Are we kidding ourselves about wind power?

Are you sitting around thinking wind power is part of our future? Maybe it's time to think again. GE, Siemens, Vestas et. al. have raped European taxpayers and are doing the same in the United States. You just don't hear about it.





"The voices of Kamaoa cry out their warning as a new batch of colonists, having looted the taxpayers of Spain, Portugal, and Greece, seeks to expand upon their multi-billion-dollar foothold half a world away on the shores of the distant Potomac River. European wind developers are fleeing the EU's expiring wind subsidies, shuttering factories, laying off workers, and leaving billions of Euros of sovereign debt and a continent-wide financial crisis in their wake. But their game is not over. Already they are tapping a new vein of lucre from the taxpayers and ratepayers of the United States."





From "Wind Energy's Ghosts":


http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/w鈥?/a>








Are wind farms financially sustainable on their own?


http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/鈥?/a>





Should wind be permitted on the grid in places where winds are not strong or sustainable enough to support it? Can wind support the voltage level required for the grid to be stable? What happens when wind speeds are low, causing farms to act like capacitors and exposing the transmission system to failures? Is it even a viable base load source - and what quick response generators must be used when the wind dies down?





Before you get upset about this being some sort of ideological rant, please note that I have invested my own time, energy and some money into wind power, and attended Windpower 2009 in Chicago last year.|||As much as we are kidding ourselves about solar power in the north. Such as the $700,000 total green house they built in the Detroit area but couldn't open because the solar panels didn't get enough sun. Well gee....it's not like Michigan weather has changed much ...so you wonder why someone didn't think that one through a bit more.|||By itself, it is not enough. Combined with other energy sources it is not bad. If we were to drill here and drill now we would be better off.|||wind, solar geothermal, etc. are just drops in the bucket, under some circumstances they make sense, like for Call Boxes where it would be too costly to run power to or to power electric pumps to pump water from a well





the only sensible answer to our energy needs is nuclear, the technology now exist to have gas cooled reactors which is much safer than liquid cooled, there is zero emissions, it is cheap and would help reduce our dependency on other countries, also clean cheap electricity would make hydrogen powered vehicles practical|||Wind power is not sufficient, by itself, to provide all the electricity we need. There's no doubt about that. We need to stop burning fossil fuels and we desperately need something to replace fossil-fuel-fired electricity generation with. Ideally, we should also greatly reduce our consumption of power, there are many ways we can do that, but there seems little will.





Surely wind power can be regulated before it leaves the wind farm, so that it does not "expose the transmission system to failures"; I'm pretty sure that does happen here in Australia.





Wind power (particularly in Australia), and sustainability, are subjects that have interested me for a long time; hence the pages mentioned in my sources.