World's first floating wind farm now operating in Scotland

[NeoGreen]

https://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/worlds-first-floating-wind-farm-now-operating-scotland.html

World's first floating wind farm now operating in Scotland

We've been following the development of the Hywind floating wind farm project with great interest, and were super encouraged when it was followed by announcements of other, larger installations.

By offering floating turbines that are anchored to the floor via a cable, as opposed to by expensive and difficult to install fixed foundations, the hope is the this technology will both drive down costs and open up new areas to wind energy development. And this means the potential for harvesting stronger, steadier winds farther out at sea.

But all that depends, of course, on whether it actually works. The good news is that we should now be able to find out, as developer Statoil has announced that the project is now officially live and producing energy.

(snip)

“This marks an exciting development for renewable energy in Scotland. Our support for floating offshore wind is testament to this government’s commitment to the development of this technology and, coupled with Statoil’s Battery Storage Project, Batwind, puts us at the forefront of this global race and positions Scotland as a world centre for energy innovation,”

That battery storage initiative—reported on by us here—will add a 1MW storage capacity to the project, potentially offering even more utility in terms of stability of output and leveling out the peaks and troughs of renewable energy production.

[NNadir]

1. That should kill a lot of sea life to make the world safe for the gas industry.

It's amazing that these environmental disasters are celebrated.

This is perfect of course, for Stadtoil, since they're an oil and gas company, and let's face it, the wind industry is just lipstick on the gas pig.

Something is very wrong with the modern mind.

[caraher]

2. What is your estimate of sea life mortality from floating turbines?

I'm not sure how one would assess that at this stage, given that this is the first set of floating turbines.

[NNadir]

3. The effect of wind turbines on seabirds is the subject of considerable scientific literature.

I offered some references on the subject in this post:

A few, among thousands of references

I also covered this matter in this post: A Minor Problem For Sound Science of the Effect of Offshore Windfarms on Seabirds: There Isn't Any.

This seems to have generated a lot of comment, although I didn't read any of it, because apparently was run by at least one person on my "ignore" list. I put people on my ignore list when I find them particularly delusional and uninformed and dogmatic.

It is very clear, as any one who can look at the results of the trillions of dollars squandered on so called "renewable energy" can see:

The so called "renewable energy" scam didn't work, isn't working and won't work. We got into the tens of billions and then hundreds of billions of dollars per year on so called renewable energy beginning in about 2004. Here's the results:



As for the effect on sea life, my remarks in the two previous posts and the references to the primary scientific literature - a tiny portion of it - is just limited, of course, to birds, but, um floating stuff, particularly rickety floating stuff that is rickety and prone to collapse or sinking is a well known ecological hazard. This is true of ships, but now we propose to add tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of floating wind turbines, which we can surmise from the Danish data, will become landfill in 15 to 20 years. This crap is filled with grease and polymers. It won't be pretty sitting on the bottom of the ocean, which is where, frankly, it will all end up.

In any case the wind industry requires redundant gas and other fossil fuel crap to back it up. The effect of oil and gas drilling, particularly off shore - one of the worst scummy off shore oil drilling countries is Denmark - is disastrous. It's no accident that the Danes and the Norwegians (Stadtoil) are big wind supporters.

Danish Energy Agency Oil and Gas Leasing

The wind energy experiment has soaked up trillions of dollars for no good reason. The idea that it's "green" persists among people who have a very limited knowledge or no knowledge whatsoever of science and engineering, and who, at least in my opinion, don't give a rat's ass about the environment.

Thanks for asking.

[NeoGreen]

5. But I read here on DU "Estimates of the effects of wind farms on seabird...

...demographic rates are neither robust nor validated.

Estimates of the effects of wind farms on seabird demographic rates are neither robust nor validated

https://www.democraticunderground.com/122853659

[NNadir]

6. If you wish, you should read the entire paper linked in that post.

You might not be so smug after reading the text in the scientific paper.

It's open sourced. Any fool, or for that matter any intelligent person can read it.

Here, again, is the link to it: J Appl Ecol, 53: 1635–164

What the paper says, if you read it, is that this useless garbage which has been totally and completely ineffective at slowing the rate of the destruction of the planetary atmosphere (and has, again, actually made that destruction occur faster than ever), is approved with sloppy and frankly garbage science.

This is different that saying that there is no science; it is saying that the "science" used for regulation is garbage.

In fact, if you want my opinion, the wind garbage approval process is all hand waving and wishful thinking, not just fucking up the seas with this rickety temporary crap, but the whole damn wind industry everywhere, said industry functioning solely and totally as lipstick on the natural gas pig.

As I say lots of times, the scientific literature is your friend. Very few anti-nuke partisans of the "renewables will save us" type ever display to my satisfaction, even a cursory or low level experience with science.

This is not an ethically neutral position by the way. Every damned year, more than 7 million people die from air pollution.

If one insists on getting one's science from DU, and only DU, one can read about it here: Pollution linked to one in six deaths

Frequently I post a link to the same prestigious journal cited in the newspaper article linked by the DUer, mine referring directly to the journal itself.

A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (Lancet 2012, 380, 2224–60: For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.)

This paper isolates air pollution deaths from other sources of pollution.

These air pollution deaths, 70 million every decade, more than were killed by all causes in World War II, combat, bombing, disease and genocide combined, take place while anti-nukes sit on the bourgeois asses promoting the wind industry, which they say will some day be significant, using projecting a date after which they, conveniently, will be dead.

This morally questionable approach is based on an insistence that future generations - precisely the generations screwed by this generation waiting for the grand "renewable" future has not come, is not here, and will never come - will do what they themselves have proved incompetent to do.

Twenty years from now I predict that all these useless floating wind turbines will be even more garbage for the screwed future generations to clean up, doing so with diminished resources, a degraded environment, and a rapidly collapsing atmosphere.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend.

[NickB79]

7. The effects of man-made reefs are well-documented

And they are consistently shown to be a boon for sealife. The Pacific is littered with the remains of sunken WWII ships overrun with corals and fish.

[NNadir]

8. One wonders therefore how sea life survived billions of years without ship wrecks.

We may disagree on what is well known, but in any case hundreds of thousands of rotting wind turbines are quite different from, ships, although many sunken ships, including the USS Arizona in Honolulu harbor are not considered environmentally benign.

A useless wind turbine that was part of a trillion dollar scam to make the world safe for the gas industry that falls into the sea is not a ship. It's a pile of electronic waste, some of the most intractable waste on this planet right now.

Rather than being like, um, say the USS Arizona, which is only releasing oil into Pearl Harbor - something that the rickety pieces of garbage that the hundreds of thousands of greasy wind turbines will also do after falling into the ocean - the wrecks of thousands upon thousands of wind turbines will be more like the wreck of the The “Sea Diamond” shipwreck.

The “Sea Diamond” shipwreck: environmental impact assessment in the water column and sediments of the wreck area

(Dimitrakakis, E., Hahladakis, J. & Gidarakos, E. Int. J. Environ. Sci. Technol. (2014) 11: 1421.)

The "Sea Diamond" wreck involved electronic waste, specifically 150 television sets and it is giving disturbing results on its local impact. A single large scale wind turbine crashing into the sea will be considerably more massive than 150 television sets.

In any case, you have not shared any references for this "fact" that you say is "well documented," the idea that having a World War with a huge naval component was good for "sea life."

Call me a skeptic, but I don't believe it. I mean, one comes across articles like um, say, this one Mercury from WWII submarine wreck pollutes sediments off Norway, never mind the USS Arizona, all the time if one wanders around the scientific literature.


In any case, such a claim is completely and totally unrelated to wind turbines, since wind turbines are compact, loaded with some of the most dire components of current oceanic pollution, covered repeatedly in environmental scientific journals, specifically polymers.

If one searches, ocean, "plastic pollution" on Google scholar one will get more than 100,000 hits in less than a second.

Frankly, I opposed to viewing the ocean as a garbage dump, much as I am opposed to use the planetary atmosphere as a garbage dump, although it seems that many people - even some claiming to be "environmentalists" - are not as concerned as I am.

An interesting paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience has this to say about so called "renewable energy" and it's material requirements:

Initially, the energy needed for metal extraction will come from fossil fuels. Eventually, renewable energy is likely to come to the fore, with benefits in terms of reduced greenhouse gas emissions and radioactive waste production. However, this transition will also cause much additional global demand for raw materials: for an equivalent installed capacity, solar and wind facilities require up to 15 times more concrete, 90 times more aluminium50 times more iron, copper and glass than fossil fuels or nuclear energy (Supplementary Fig. 1). Yet, current production of wind and solar energy meets only about 1% of global demand, and hydroelectricity meets about 7% (ref. 2)

If the contribution from wind turbines and solar energy to global energy production is to rise from the current 400 TWh (ref. 2) to 12,000 TWh in 2035 and 25,000 TWh in 2050, as projected by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)7 , about 3,200 million tonnes of steel, 310 million tonnes of aluminium and 40 million tonnes of copper will be required to build the latest generations of wind and solar facilities (Fig. 2). This corresponds to a 5 to 18% annual increase in the global production of these metals for the next 40 years. This rise in production will be added to the accelerating global demand for ferrous, base and minor metals, from both developing and developed countries, which inflates currently by about 5% per year 5,6. Currently, 10% of world energy consumption is used for extraction and processing of mineral resources8 . Without extraordinary advances in mining and refining technology, this fraction is set to rise as poorer and more remote deposits are tapped. Moreover, some of the commonly used metals and minerals are rare, at least at the level of purity that is required for efficient production of energy. For example, the silica used in the protective glass of photovoltaic panels must contain less than 90 ppm of iron, to ensure high transmission of light.

Metals for a low-carbon society (Olivier Vidal, Bruno Goffé and Nicholas Arndt, Nature Geoscience, Vol 6, 894-896 (2013)).

I would question that a form of energy that has massive material requirements on a planet with limited supplies is engaged in clearly Trumpian type advertising if it advertises itself as "renewable."

But it's not the material requirements that make the wind industry dangerous. The wind industry is dangerous because it doesn't work and therefore allows an untenable situation to persist, specifically the use of dangerous fossil fuels.

Now, I could waste some more time by noting that the wind industry is being studied extensively for it's impact on benthic sea life, that is the sea life that lives on the sea floor, which will, um, surely be impacted by having greasy ships pour carbon intensive concrete on said sea floor to install greasy wind turbines that will last for maybe twenty years (if we're lucky - the average Danish wind turbine doesn't make 20 according to the Danish energy website's comprehensive database of their "lipstick on their gas pig" turbines.)

But the reality which is clear as day is that the trillion dollar investment in the useless wind industry in the last ten years has done nothing to even slow the rate of dangerous fossil fuel waste concentrations in the atmosphere. In fact, the opposite has happening. We are no experiencing a rate of 2.2 ppm per year increases, the highest rate ever observed.

Nevertheless, if one challenges the rote unthinking enthusiasm for this scam - an enthusiasm I once shared until I looked more deeply into the matter when hearing dumb stuff from anti-nukes about how great the wind industry is and exposing their claims for what they are, hand waving - one will not win popularity contests.

But ethics is not about popularity; it's about facing unpleasant realities and doing what one can to oppose them.

Right now, the "bandwagon fallacy" is operating big time where the so called "renewable energy" scam is concerned, and the excuses for its failure and its massive impact are ever and ever more tortured.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

[modrepub]

9. Glass Building Bird Kills

OK, there are an estimated 1 billion birds kills from collisions with glass every year. I've even spotted a dead bat at the foot of a large glass building in downtown Philadelphia so maybe they get those creatures too. You never hear about banning large glass buildings or mirror type glass buildings though I guess you could say there are steps you can take to reduce the number of glass strikes. Even with numbers this large (1,000,000,000 kills) I don't think the bird population is in any serious danger of extinction from these obstacles. I'd say the same with wind farms unless proven otherwise.

In my honest opinion, more birds have become extinct from habitat loss than over killing (what about car strikes, electrocution and cat/dog/other animal kills?). Most bird flyways have been broken up or otherwise obstructed by man-made changes to the environment (for example the loss of the Colorado estuary in the Gulf of California). The point is that birds have generally found ways around our obstacles in most cases. Not to say this isn't or wouldn't be important and more research should be done to determine how we can help species adapt or limit large scale wind farms in sensitive areas but to wash your hands on a whole industry (and not allow it to innovate) when I can come up with several other large-scale bird kill processes doesn't make much sense. In the long run, energy development and production will be responsive to the economics of cost to produce versus price of sale (and this is often local depending on demand and fuel availability/price).