Ian Bradford: Wind Turbines Are Never Going To Meet Our Energy Needs

Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47^th President of the United States.  This is his second term and he has wasted no time in signing off a number of executive orders.  An executive order is a directive from the president that manages operations of the Federal Government. It has the force of law and does not require any action by congress. 

He seems to be streets ahead of our New Zealand Prime Minister, immediately withdrawing from the Paris Climate accord, and clearly indicating his feelings towards wind farms. 

Here is his executive order concerning wind farms. 

The temporary withdrawal of all areas on the outer continental shelf from offshore wind leasing and review of the Federal Government’s leasing permitting practices for wind projects

This executive order President Trump signed on his first day in office temporarily halts offshore wind energy lease sales in Federal waters and pauses approvals, permits and loans for both offshore and onshore wind. The pause would last for 6 months. The withdrawal went into effect on the 21^st January 2025 and will remain until the Presidential memorandum is revoked. 

A back-lash against wind and solar at the county level, often for aesthetic reasons, but also for health reasons and harm to wildlife,  has meant that in 2023, 15% of U.S. counties have banned or blocked new utility scale wind or solar installations.  

The order describes the withdrawal as temporary preventing consideration of any shelf area for new or any renewed energy leasing, but it specifies it does not apply to leasing related to oil, gas, minerals and environmental conservation. 

The order reflects President’s Trump’s  opposition to wind energy stating that the consequences of onshore and offshore wind farms may lead to grave harm, including negative effects on navigational safety interests (It has been found that offshore wind farms interfere with ships radar), transportation interests, national security interests, commercial interests, and marine mammals.  

Many assessments will be done. One assessment must consider the environmental impact  of offshore and onshore wind projects on  wildlife including, but not limited  to birds and marine mammals.  Another, must consider the economic cost associated with the intermittent generation of energy and the effect of subsidies on the viability of the wind industry.    

Steps will be taken to accelerate other forms of energy production. President Trump called for a reliable and affordable supply of energy, saying it was necessary to power the manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, and defence industries. and to sustain the basics of modern life and military preparedness. 

Why won’t wind energy meet energy demands? 

Using wind to extract energy is not a new idea. Early boats were powered by sails, windmills turned millstones to grind grain and to pump water. Using wind to produce electricity is a new idea.  On the surface this energy seems to be free, clean and unlimited. But there are many problems. Below is a global wind map. You can see that most of the wind occurs over the sea,  (The red and red-brown areas). A lot of the annual wind over land is less than 5 metres per sec (mps).  The biggest criticism of wind power is that it is intermittent. So the power output cannot be controlled, unlike coal, gas, or nuclear.  If there is no wind then there has to be back-up from batteries which are hugely expensive, and from coal, gas and nuclear. 

So we need the wind to blow at a useful speed which produces the maximum energy from the turbines.  In large parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, India and China, where billions of people live and industrial production is high, the useful speed is seldom achieved. So location is an important consideration as far as power output is concerned. Existing wind operations are occupying prime locations worldwide, and technology is reaching physical limits, so what we call “natural capacity” factors will actually decrease over time.  This is contrary to Net Zero plans, often assuming that the average natural capacity factors will increase over time. (Note: That fraction of time that the wind blows at a useful speed to power a wind turbine is called “Natural Capacity Factor”, which results in an estimated average percentage per annum.) The natural capacity factor for the countries mentioned above only reaches single digit percentages. 

What about conversion efficiency?  In the last century Betz in 1926 determined the maximum conversion efficiency of an ideal wind turbine to be 59%. Real world turbines operate well below this limit due to various losses in the gearbox, inverter and other components. Today’s newest turbines reach about 40% conversion efficiency and this is close to the physical limits of them. 

Below is the Weibull wind speed distribution (Weibull, 1951).  It plots the probability of wind speed and power extraction. You need to use the wind turbine at the highest possible speed but you are limited by nature.  The Weibull curve is the black dashed line and follows the typical speed distribution of winds found globally. The power output depends on the cube of the wind speed, but you need to take the efficiency of the turbine into account also. So this means for example, that if the wind speed increase 2 times the power output should be 2³  or 8 times as great. In practice this is never achieved.  The wind turbine output is designed to saturate at a specific wind speed and this is done by adjusting the rotor shape. The adjustment of rotor shape is for optimisation purposes and is usually near a wind speed of 12 mps.  Past the saturation wind speed the electrical output is held nearly constant by adjusting the rotor shape and orientation to avoid it blowing up. The necessary technical manipulation results in a loss of efficiency. Rotor control permits wind speeds up to 25 mps without destroying it. As wind speed increase above 25 mps the turbine turns off to avoid its destruction. So no power with a wind speed greater than 25 mps.  

Also little power can be produced at wind speeds below 5 mps.  An efficient wind turbine is the compromise between the probability of wind speeds and the optimisation of the energy output.   

Now everyone is familiar with the wake from a boat. This is the sea disturbance behind a moving boat because of its displacement of water. Wind turbines have a wake too. When a wind turbine extracts energy from the wind, it creates a region behind the turbine where the wind speed is lower and the flow is more turbulent.  The wake effect can reduce the  power output of downstream turbines in a wind farm because they encounter slower and more turbulent wind conditions. Wakes can cause issues in wind farm design and operation as they reduce overall energy production and require strategic spacing of turbines to mitigate the effects of wakes on adjacent turbines. 

Existing wind farms rarely meet the required criteria. As turbines get larger, spacing must also increase but it seldom happens. So the efficiency of a turbine is further decreased. A great deal more land must be taken up, and this is seldom achieved because of costs.  Too much land already has been taken out of production by wind and solar. Too many wind turbines placed close together would literally stop the wind. 

Looking at the environment, all energy systems have a negative impact on the environment. It is a question of which ones have the least impact. Buildings for gas, coal and nuclear take up relatively little land.  Hydro schemes flood an area to produce a storage lake. Some solar farms are huge.  They may take up hundreds of acres. Most of the land they take up is flat, and so was useful for farming. The number of trees bulldozed for wind farms is huge.  Frequently, Scotland is quoted as some 14 million trees have been felled for wind farms.  Wildlife habitats have been destroyed in the construction of these large wind farms. You also have to consider the energy and raw materials required to build the turbines and more important the ancillary systems built by using cement, steel, fibreglass, aluminium, copper and a hundred more components that are not possible without coal, oil and gas. 

I have previously written about the impact on birds, bats, insects and large whales. The offshore turbines in construction also impact lobsters, and crabs.  By now, many millions of birds have been sliced up by these turbine blades. Conservation groups and green political parties have been strangely silent. 

Various researchers have found that large scale wind farms would cause warming that would take approximately a century to offset. Smaller scale wind farms cause localised warming by mixing air from higher altitudes down to the surface at night. Large scale wind farms may cause more widespread warming. As the number of wind farms increase there will be more warming. They can also redistribute moisture, potentially increasing rainfall in some areas.  Large scale wind farms warm the climate as do solar farms. Lu et al, (2020), have detailed global rise in temperature caused by large scale solar farms in the Sahara. Devitt  et al,  (2020), also demonstrated solar panels induced warming. If so many solar panels were built to match the power demand specified by “Net Zero 20250”, then they could raise the global temperature by over a degree C. Isn’t that ironic?  

Intermittent “renewables”,  such as wind and solar claim to be low cost reducing the power bill of the everyday citizen.  This is not the case. The fundamental reasons why wind and solar are the most expensive are: 1, the low energy output, 2, the short operational lifetime, and 3, the intermittency. 

To overcome all this, the following needs to be done:  

1.          A huge overbuild to compensate for the low natural capacity factor, energy losses, and to charge storage. 

2.         The need for short duration energy storage (Batteries), to overcome short term fluctuations.     

3.          Long duration energy storage ( ??????) to overcome days and weeks of slow wind speeds.

4.          Suitable back-up power plants that are reliable 24 hours per day. 

5.          A much larger and more complex network integration structure. 

Then there is the question of supply chains. China controls the vast majority of electric vehicles and solar panel supply chains, and the vast majority of wind turbines are now made in China. So the dependence on China for wind, solar and EV manufacturing is an issue.  In 2010 China put a temporary embargo on rare metal exports to Japan.  In 2024, China banned  exports of gallium, germanium, antimony and others to the US in response to the US administration trying to block sales of advanced computer chips to China.

Offshore wind comes with many challenges related to construction, maintenance, operational lifetime, and network integration, plus the environmental issues relating to the death of large whales in particular. 

Offshore wind farm manufacturers such as Orsted and Shell are facing massive losses. There are almost endless news reports giving details about the problems that Orsted, Enel, Enercon, Nordex, BP, Shell, Siemens, Gamesa, Equinor, General Electric and many more face. Norway’s Equinor, a leading developer in “renewable” energy recently withdrew from offshore wind projects in Vietnam, Spain and Portugal, citing unsustainable costs. Shell has sold its stakes in projects across Massachusetts, South Korea, Ireland France .....  The list is almost endless.  

On the other hand onshore wind is becoming an eyesore.  In the 2024 winter, Germany experienced Dunkelflaute with little or no wind and the country had to fall back on power imports as coal and gas appeared to be running at capacity but not meeting demand. 

To Summarise:

Those in the NZ Government seem to take no notice of what is happening overseas. The NZ Prime Minister should follow President Trump’s lead and stop all future construction of wind and solar farms.  If we are to progress as a nation, we need reliable forms of energy, and the NZ government should be looking at alternative reliable forms right now otherwise we shall find ourselves having power outages, as the demand increases.  

Wind is scarce where the bulk of the world population lives. Most wind is over the oceans.

The fraction of time (changed to a percentage), that the wind blows at a useful speed to power a wind turbine is called “natural capacity factor.”  Globally, this percentage Lies around 23%. In large parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, India and China where billions of people live, the natural capacity factor for wind only reaches single digits. So in other words, in the countries listed the wind never blows at a useful speed for wind turbines.

Real world turbines operate at an efficiency of only 40% under ideal conditions.  Efficiency is lowered because of losses in the gearbox, inverter and other components. The rotor angle and shape is designed to give maximum power at a wind speed of 12 metres per second (mps). At all other speeds a turbine operates below maximum efficiency i.e. below 40%. Below 5 mps and above 25 mps there is no output at all. 

Like moving boats, wind turbines produce a wake. The wake causes a turbulence and slower wind speeds for downstream adjacent turbines whose efficiency is further reduced.   

Wind turbines have an impact on the environment. They need a lot of material to build, and take up a lot of land, plus they have a disastrous effect on birds, bats, and whales to name a few.  

They cause a local, and possibly a global rise in temperature. 

Wind energy is the most expensive form of energy. 

China has a monopoly on materials needed for EV’s, solar and wind. They could stop releasing these materials at any time. So supply is not necessarily assured. 

Many builders of wind farms are now pulling out, citing excessive and unsustainable costs.    

Hopefully, it will get to a stage where no builder will take on a wind farm.  New alternative reliable forms of energy are in the pipeline.  Who will take responsibility to remove all the thousands of wind turbines at around about $1 million dollars each? Just think about all those blades going into landfills and being there for a very long time.

Reference:  Unpopular Truth  

FOOTNOTE: 

Germany’s first offshore wind farm is to be dismantled after only 15 years. The Alpha Ventus offshore wind farm near German North Sea Island of Borkum, is set to be dismantled after being in operation for only 15 years, as it has become too unprofitable to operate without massive subsidies.   

Ian Bradford, a science graduate, is a former teacher, lawyer, farmer and keen sportsman, who is writing a book about the fraud of anthropogenic climate change.