Editorials

WINDMILLS

15/03/05 14:51 Filed in: My Ideas


When you drive to Yosemite National Park from San Francisco you come around a corner and see thousands of windmills covering the hills. They are stunning.

 Flying over the German countryside, you see individual windmills in the middle of round-abouts, probably providing the energy for the highway lighting.

 In the north of the U.K. you can see them next to the highway, doing their job … and now there is a movement to bring them to Australia.

But what is their job?

 To give money to the German and Belgian gearbox and propeller manufacturers.

In Australia, Governments subsidise them.

I find them very nice to look at … some people hate them.

 I seriously doubt that birds, (who daily miss aircraft approaching them at 300 k.p.h. during approach), are stupid enough to run into them. The blades are just too slow. I reckon that more birds would run into windows in the suburbs of Melbourne than are killed in the world by windmills.

The noise issue for locals living near the wind farms concerns me, as much as the noise of, say the traffic on the M5 near Bristol, UK. You just can’t bring that kind of 24 / 7 noise to rural areas and expect people to just live with it.

 But the reason I am against using wind technology as anything other than a supplement to a solar system is because they are only efficient ten percent of the time.

Most time there is not enough wind, especially on hot days when the power load is the greatest.

But worse, they are limited by high winds, so are turned-off when you’d think they’d be most efficient.

 Wind farms are used by Pollies as a ready-made solution to the cry that they are not doing anything about sustainable technology.

It’s deplorable, and they should be called on it everytime.

 15th March 2005


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