Wind Corporation Games

Go back to 2009. That was the year Vestas closed their wind turbine blade manufacturing plant on the Isle of Wight.

It was an ugly messy affair. 

Hundreds of people were thrown out of work. A group of the work force occupied the factory. Some redundancy payments were refused and folk were reduced to severe economic hardship. (Telegraph Report Here) (On the Wight Report Here)

Why did all this happen? The company stated that there was no market for wind turbines in the UK. (Business Green report Here)

Remember this was right in the middle of the government sponsored planning orgy that allowed massive wind turbine deployment across the UK. This calamity has effectively industrialised large areas of previously rural or wild land.

So Vestas' stated reason was (how should we say...) economical with the truth. Perhaps they knew that the government was so in-thrall to the wind industry that closing down their Isle of Wight factory would have little effect their market share.

The same year they went on to employ another 5000 people in China, the USA and Spain. But it was not just the Isle of Wight that took a hammering. In Scandinavia (including Denmark itself), 3000 loyal employees (properly paid and working in unsubsidised factories) were made redundant.

Factories and employees that had built up the Vestas business were cast off like used Kleenexe. Meanwhile Vestas slavered over cheap labour, subsidies and the political leverage of bringing “employment” to hard hit areas.

In a ruthlessly globalist and morally repugnant way Vestas actually expanded its work force in 2009.

Now come forward to the present day.

All of a sudden, in a great fanfare of Green Roo-ha-ha Vestas are back.

With a perverse sense of deja-vu they plan to set up a manufacturing facility on the Isle Wight and in total bring 800 jobs to the UK specifically to manufacture offshore wind turbine blades.

The exact number destined for the Isle of Wight is unclear.

So why is this corporate monster so keen all of a sudden to kiss and make up with the unemployed on the Isle of Wight?

I think the answer comes in a single ugly coast scarring phrase. Navitus Bay.

Navitus Bay is the name given to a huge wind farm planned to lie just offshore of the Jurassic Coast and the golden sands of Bournemouth Bay. By “sheer conincidence” it is currently going through the planning approval stage

Navitus is in trouble. They were hoping to steam-roller their money making scheme though the planning process but they have met stiff opposition from everyone from local councils, international environmental organisations (Unesco), local MPs and rank and file local residents. The number of written objections to this proposed calamity is now a national record.

Navitus plan to spend around £800 million on turbines. So wouldn't it be rather convenient if at this point in time local jobs were hostage to offshore turbine orders, and those orders were in turn dependent on getting approval for this ruinous industrial wind complex?

I have three predictions:

Prediction One:

If things get tough for Navitus (which I sincerely hope they will) all of a sudden you will get rumblings from Vestas about “unwilling to invest in jobs in a hostile environment” or some other such bullshit.

Assorted political lackys will then line up to warn how rejecting Navitus will “destroy Green jobs”. Even though Vestas has been quite effective at doing that on the Isle of Wight already.

Prediction Two:

God forbid. If this monstrosity were ever to be built, then its going to be Vestas turbines all the way.

Prediction Three:

Finally as to the “new” Vestas jobs:

Navitus Bay threatens to destroy a huge number of jobs and seriously impact the tourist industry all along this coast. The jobs brought to the Isle of Wight by Vestas will be but a drop in the ocean compared to those lost.

But I predict the jobs building turbine blades will be safe. That is until they are needed elsewhere in the world to exert some political influence or, in true ugly globalist fashion, the Isle of Wight workforce can be undercut and their jobs exported.

Remember especially with this last point, Vestas already have a track record.

Yet Another Damning Wind Power Report

Another detailed and peer reviewed report on the effectiveness of wind power has been recently published by the Adam Smith Institute. (h/t to @strumcrazy at twitter)

The report has been produced by an Engineer with a long history in the power generation industry including pumped hydro. It's data is unimpeachable and is based on reliable wind speed data obtained from airport meteorology stations. 

The summary is brutally factual and casts a long black shadow over all the vacuous hype over wind power recently seen in the UK.

The document is available Here

Here are some of those brutal facts. (but by no means all)

Over one year the UK model showed:

Power exceeds 90% of available power for only 17 hours

Power exceeds 80% of available power for 163 hours

Power is below 20% of available power for 3,448 hours (20 weeks)

Power is below 10% of available power for 1,519 hours (9 weeks)

The most common output of the entire theoretical 10GW UK wind turbine fleet is 800MW or 8%.

The probability that the wind fleet will produce full output is vanishingly small.

Long gaps in significant wind production occur in all seasons.

To cover these gaps would need energy storage equivalent to 15 Dinorwig size plants (incidentally Dinorwig cost £1.5Bn. It is also not far short of being geologically unique in the UK – Billo)

As we cannot build 15 Dinorwig's in the UK we could do what the German Energiewende is doing and build dirty Lignite burning coal plant instead as backup. ( that is not a serious suggestion by the way)

Of course, if this was just one paper, however scrupulously prepared, we may well be entitled to a level of skepticism about its findings.

But this is very far from the first.

In 2010 The famous Nature conservancy charity “The John Muir Trust” commissioned a report by Stuart Young Consulting. The John Muir Trust webpage on this report (with link) is Here The actual Paper on its own is Here

Stuart Young Consulting (using actual generation data) found the following:

Over a two year period (2008-10) The UK wind turbine fleet was:

• below 20% of capacity more than half the time
• below 10% of capacity over one third of the time
• below 2.5% capacity for the equivalent of one day in twelve
• below 1.25% capacity for the equivalent of just under one day a month

Again that is just a subset of the dismal performance they found.

Does it stop there? – No. Here are a few more reports:

Reports by:

Mercados Consulting – Powerful Targets (2012 originally suppressed by UK govt.) Link Here

Civitas – The Folly of Windpower (2012) Link Here

Prof. G Hughs Edinburgh University - Why Is Wind Power So Expensive? (2012) Link Here

The Royal Academy of Engineers – The Cost of Generating Electricity (2004) Link Here

Note that the oldest of these reports dates back some 10 years. This is not new knowledge but it has been comprehensively buried and suppressed by the wind industry and their political backers.

But as the saying goes: 

The truth will out.