Oh. Dear.
Where to start. Ummm… how about Hughes? Prof Hughes has long been biased against wind power and the results of his “study” have been rejected.
“The Financial Times reported that the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change rejected Prof Hughes’ findings. “Our expectations of wind turbine lifetimes are based on rigorous analysis and evidence,” the department said. “Britain’s oldest commercial turbines at Delabole in Cornwall have only recently been replaced after 20 years of operation, and the technology has come on in leaps and bounds since that project started generating in 1991.”
The Financial Times also quotes Dale Vince, the founder of Ecotricity, one of the UK’s oldest renewable energy companies, saying the study was “just more anti-wind propaganda”.”
“In Scotland The Herald quotes Jenny Hogan, director of policy for Scottish Renewables, saying “Let’s also remember that Gordon Hughes’s previous research on wind energy has been described by the UK Energy Research Council’s Dr Robert Gross and others at Imperial College, London, as ‘economically irrational, a nonsense scenario’ and ‘economically absurd, spurious and misleading’.””
“ Hughes’s report, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, compared his calculations for the capital cost of building the infrastructure, and did not include the total cost of supplying the electricity. In other words, this comparison for the cost of gas and wind ignores the cost of gas.”
And perhaps if the Professor has found a “hidden truth” he’d be good enough to share it with the rest of us and at the same time subject it to peer review.
BTW, “21stcenturysciencetech.com” is pretty much a junk science site. Cfact is more of the same, an anti-fact, anti-science, anti-climate change denialist site. (In fact, three of the primary funders of CFACT are the Carthage Foundation, Exxon Mobil, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation.)
Moving on, it’s true that wind and solar are considered “intermittent” sources… which is why work is proceeding on stored energy systems. And also why Elon Musk is working with the Austrailian government (to go with your example) to provide storage systems.
But since you quoted the University of Montana web site and as such seem to trust it as a legitimate source, I’ll leave you with this quote from their site:
“Anthropogenic climate change will have negative consequences on the planet, today and in the future. In order to avoid massive decay of human health and quality of life, rates of emissions need to be curbed at or near current levels. Though there is great opportunity for individual nations to lead the way, climate change is a global problem and therefore requires global solutions.”
And just so you know, the rebuttals here are for whoever else might read this, not you, as I’m afraid your mind is already closed on this particular subject.
