Wind turbines are neither clean nor green and they provide zero global energy

TLDR: Editorialist in UK conservative political magazine[0] tilting at windmills as sources of clean energy. His hobby, apparently, or his job[1].

It's too easy to shoot holes in his "facts". I won't even try. He's deliberately being intelectually dishonest, coating his opinion in statistics carefully taken out of context.

Now for an interesting look at wind power technology, have a look at a list of the ten most powerful wind turbines[2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spectator [1] https://www.spectator.co.uk/author/matt-ridley/ [2] http://www.windpowermonthly.com/10-biggest-turbines

Here's his logic, so you don't have to subject yourself to that "article" -> solar and wind contribute very little to global energy at the moment. Energy demand is growing at 2% per year. Therefore, wind and solar won't contribute a significant chunk of energy ever. Therefore, let's invest in gas.

Dumpster tier reporting. On a side note, does HN blacklist any sites for being chronically bad?

We already generate ~6% of all our power in the US by wind power, which is incredible considering that modern wind turbines installation really only hit its stride in 2010 or so. Of course much of the world is behind the US–we lead the world in a lot of things. This is a silly and unthoughtful hit piece. Advocating for natural gas as a cleaner source than wind power is borderline idiotic. Dumpster bin article.

His claim that wind turbines are useless because they take the effort of 150 tons of coal to produce the steel is interesting. He didn't follow it up with the obvious calculation of how long a wind turbine take a to get that energy back. I did a quick calculation, and it looks like you can recover that input coal energy in only a few months of operation.

I read the article and read the comments. The article had numbers, the comments have mostly invectives.

If he is wrong, could someone who is knowledgeable take his numbers and state why they are wrong?

This is a honest question. I would like to have energy, ideally clean energy, uber ideally lots of clean energy. He is telling that wind and photovoltaic are not enough, by large, to replace our energy use of today. Why is he wrong? If we wanted to completely switch to green energy, would this be technically possible? (let's put the political agendas aside, I want to take this opportunity to actually make up my mind)

Before you waste your precious time one should consider that the author has quite the history of writing contrarian articles related to climate change and renewable energy that are poorly researched and/or flat out wrong. The author also has no real experience in the field.

The author (Matt Ridley) has an interesting story actually. He because chairman of Northern Rock, following in daddy's footsteps and oversaw it as it went spectacularly bust - the first run on a UK bank in 150 years.

Now he appears to be cheerleading for another industry (fracking/oil) that is piled high with debt:

http://www.econmatters.com/2014/07/oil-companys-fracking-deb...

You could probably run a profitable hedge fund that simply bet against his predictions.

"As for resource consumption and environmental impacts, the direct effects of wind turbines — killing birds and bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands — is bad enough. But out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale, which is why the phrase ‘clean energy’ is such a sick joke and ministers should be ashamed every time it passes their lips."

Wow, this got buried fast.

But it is worth considering. Hrm, Seems like Holland is known for its windmills.

Vast lands in the midwest that are unsuitable for farming are being turned into wind-farms. This is controversial because it is subsidized so it's difficult to do a cost-benefit analysis.

Finally, if climate-change is an issue, we should also consider that wind take energy out of the atmosphere whereas the proposed alternatives put waste energy into the atmosphere.

"Wind energy takes a lot of coal to setup, so we shouldn't even try" is this author's entire statement. He suggests we focus back on fossil fuels, i.e. natural gas and coal, which he admits he has a commercial interest in.

While I cannot discount his assertion of how much power it takes to build wind turbines, I can point out that using CURRENT fossil fuel power generation to bootstrap our renewables, even wind energy, is a good thing. We're not attempting to go from 0 - 60 by building an entirely separate power grid from scratch. We, as a species, are attempting to move from a harmful and eventually scarce set of fuels to clean energy. Not suddenly. Not quickly. And eventually, slow moving as it is, we will find ways to maximize renewable output. Look at how long it took to squeeze so much power from coal and oil. It didn't take 5 years, it took decades.

To decry renewables like wind because we RIGHT NOW need current coal and oil power to produce it, is worth mentioning but NOT a reason to discount such!

I'm getting a vibe that many commenters skipped the first sentence of the final paragraph because they were too preoccupied being angry that someone dare insult the economic efficiency of green energy sources.

the author states:

>And let’s put some of that burgeoning wealth in nuclear, fission and fusion, so that it can take over from gas in the second half of this century.

He's advocating for nuclear power. From a pure numbers perspective it makes a lot of sense.

Pathetic.