Anatomy of a Wind Myth Part 4

The final part of our discussion of the No Displacement myth. Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here and Part 3 is here.

How to make your own Wind Myth #4: It never hurts to find a rich businessman who stands to benefit from your myth

If you want to understand how wind power works in the UK, first take a look at this wind speed map. It is immediately obvious that not only is the wind always blowing somewhere, but also that it's not the same everywhere at the same time. Yesterday, we saw that Kent Hawkins asserts that wind power is stochastic, or random - implying that the amount of power generated varies at random rates too. Rather, wind is a series of flows of varying intensity, and those flows have predictable impacts across a spread of wind turbines over a large area. To illustrate how this affects the variability of wind generation, imagine you’re throwing tennis balls at a small-scale turbine, causing it to turn round. The frequency by which you throw tennis balls will cause different amounts of generation from the turbine. If you suddenly start throwing them at a faster rate, then the turbine will produce a generation ‘spike’.

Now imagine you’re throwing tennis balls at a series of turbines, one behind the other. Each ball hits the blade of each turbine in turn. If you suddenly increase the speed at which you’re throwing, it won’t cause an instantaneous increase in all the turbine – rather, it’ll cause generation to increase on a slower curve, as the increased generation spreads through the system over time. It’s this system-wide slower increase that gas turbines will have to compensate for – not the sudden spike of generation from an individual turbine. That’s one of reasons why a wide geographic spread of wind farms is so important, as the Danish experience shows. We see this from the Greenpeace paper I referenced yesterday; that the broader the spread of turbines, the smaller the relative rate of increase or decrease in generation.

Given that no real-world data appears to support Kent Hawkin’s contention, what inspired him to take this approach to wind power? According to a piece he put up on MasterResource in February, he derived the information supporting his work from a document put out by the Renewable Energy Foundation called ‘Reduction in Carbon Dioxide Emissions: Estimating the Potential Contribution from Wind-Power’, by former senior Esso manager David White. The article makes the same claims – and same mistakes – as the above, by raising the power plant cycling issue but making no quantitative assessment of its impact. It fails to do so because it claims insufficient research has been carried out into this field – although a UKERC report on the same subject identifies a wide variety of papers available when REF’s 2004 report was originally released.

REF is an odd organisation. Despite its name, the majority of its activity involves disseminating anti-wind propaganda. Its funding comes from a variety of wealthy anonymous donors, only a few of whom have been publicly identified. Those we know about include the property magnate Vincent Tchenguiz, whose Consensus Business Group is the major supporter of the core funding of REF. Mr Tchenguiz has previously publicly discussed the likelihood of increased arms spending by Western governments to guard against the enormous floods of people fleeing countries rendered uninhabitable by global warming. He aims to make himself indispensable to arms companies that will be recipients of this increase in spending by functioning as a co-investor on ‘flow-back’ investments these companies are compelled to make with countries who purchase their products.

Curtailing the development of the most mature renewable technology – wind – will result in higher carbon emissions, increasing the likelihood of dangerous climate change.

Mr Tchenguiz isn’t the only public figure associated with REF. The organisation’s first chairman – who only stepped down in February of this year – was Noel Edmonds. He joined REF following a prospective development near his home in Devon when the organisation was formed in 2004. We can therefore pinpoint the origin of the No Displacement wind myth quite accurately – it comes from Crinkley Bottom. I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere…