BBC Avoids Facts on Wind Farm Scam

[richard111]

I find it quite difficult to point to a deliberate bias. It tends to be quite subtle. Teddy Bear, if you feel this post is not relevant do please delete it.

What has raised my ire tonight was the flippant coverage of fitting a rotor to an off shore wind turbine. It looked all so simple and easy as much as to say "Look, no problems, its easy!"

They did have a Professor Dieter Helm, an economist from the University of Oxford, who spoke up to say wind farms are too expensive. They also suggested a visit to their web site:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14412189

Three steps to build a wind farm: The docks

No sign of any other steps as yet. No actual build details. Just pictures of moving huge turbine blades to a loading barge. All easy peasy. But what I was looking for was the building of the base on the sea bed to support those huge constructions against all the weather we get around the UK. The sheer amount of concrete and iron work in constructing those base blocks must be huge. Remember, those turbines only have a 25 year life but the bases will last for centuries.

An example of reporting which I don't think you can blame on the BBC as such was the Ocean Giants documentary on BBC1 TV the other day about whales. Very well done. Wonderful photography. But right at the end, this chap suddenly pipes up about warming seas reducing the krill growth, which will result in starvation for whales that are already in a perilous state. Yet current data shows that global sea temperatures are stable or even reducing slightly.

[Teddy Bear]

First off Richard, anybody who's taken the trouble to write a serious post will never have it deleted.
I only moved it here because I believe it fits better.

It's interesting thinking about whether BBC bias in this regard is subtle. Probably because I have been aware of it and monitoring it for so long I certainly don't see it as subtle, but can easily imagine that it would be for many till they become aware of it. Naturally this is how the BBC achieve the 'brainwashing' that they do.

I think one of the elements that make it less subtle is knowing how the BBC treats stories depending on their particular pro or con agenda.

For example, you can be sure that any future mention of Murdoch will involve reminding the reader of the News of the World hacking scandal at least several times in the particular article, regardless of whether it is relevant or not.

If we have a look at the article you linked to, the first thing that strikes one is the headline - Three steps to build a wind farm and a large picture with the words How to build a wind farm

While it sounds like something out of Blue Peter, I am wondering how many people and who would visit that page. Somebody wanting to build a Wind Farm? Somehow I doubt they would use the BBC website to get that information.

I notice the BBC also uses this article under their 'Features and Analysis' section, where they list it as
Features & Analysis
TurbinesOne, two, three... heave
How to erect a wind turbine at sea in one day

Since they show in their article that it takes 1,611,360 man hours to build a wind farm, and this doesn't count the actual manufacture of components, it would appear they are oversimplifying what's involved. Hardly something they would do if they were against it.

I remember a comedy sketch which was a take off of Blue Peter about playing the flute. Apparently you just get a flute, blow in it, and raise and lower your fingers while doing so.
As easy as that.

I notice too that in the first link from the main article, concerning the Ormonde Wind Farm, there is no mention of the costs involved.

As you noted, funny how they excluded what's involved in the base construction which is by far the biggest cost and labour intensive part of it, though they do show it on one of the links thus;



I just wonder out of a 25 year life span, how many of those years of generating electricity it needs before it justifies its installation, and that's assuming the wind blows constantly during that time.

As for the Ocean Giants documentary - I would be surprised if whoever in the BBC approves documentaries for airing is not aware of the mindset of the producer.

In the same way that great science and natural history presenter - David Bellamy disappeared from the BBC as soon as he announced that he didn't believe in man made global warming.

The BBC know who to pick and who to reject. Since Bellamy was such an advocate for planet conservation there had to be a very good reason for the BBC to suddenly 'wipe him off the planet'.

In David's words'It was in 1996 that I criticised wind farms while appearing on Blue Peter and I also had an article published in which I described global warming as poppycock.

The truth is, I didn’t think wind farms were an effective means of alternative energy so I said so. Back then, at the BBC you had to toe the line and I wasn’t doing that.

At that point I was still making loads of television programmes and I was enjoying it greatly. Then I suddenly found I was sending in ideas for TV shows and they weren’t getting taken up. I’ve asked around about why I’ve been ignored but I found that people didn’t get back to me.'

[thethinkingman]

I don't think any of us who have followed the AGW debate closely would think the BBC isn't biased towards the CAGW meme and so advances anything that reduces CO2 as being a good thing.

The detailed analyses done on the efficacy of wind power in the UK and around the world show that expected output is 25% - 30% of installed capacity as per the nameplate. In the UK the output has been much less than this over the last 12 months and it has been absent when most needed such as during the very cold weather in winter.

It has been said that the BBC pro AGW/CO2 agenda is driven by the huge investments its pension fund has made in "renewables" and CO2 mitigation enterprises. I find that an acceptable inference as the actual science is very contentious and much contended by a large and growing number of people who have decided to think for themselves rather than allowing others to do so for them.

Wind power may well have a niche application such as on yachts and such as a means of keeping small batteries charged but as a replacement for the huge, reliable, power output of coal, gas, nuclear and hydro power stations it is simply a non starter. Bear in mind that if it was viable then the grain grinding windmills of yore would still be in use today.

[Teddy Bear]

A very fair assessment TTM.

Meanwhile the plot thickens regarding the above story, courtesy of Robin Horbury at our colleagues site Biased BBC Blogspot

FRENCH CONNECTIONS....

BBC eco-nut David Shukman here waxes lyrical about a new windfarm off the coast of Cumbria that in his eyes is clearly a wonder of the modern world. There's no mention, as usual, about the vast £160m cost of its subsidy - peanuts when you're on a crusade - or about the obscenity of tipping such money down the drain at a time of spending restraint.

Mr Shukman also doesn't mention another interesting connection. This farm has been built by Swedish energy giant Vattenfall, who are part of the energy kleptocracy who are flaunting their green credentials in order to stuff as many energy subsidies down their bloated maws as they can. Vattenfall, though officially a rival to other energy companies in the renewables beano, actually works closely with them, and one of its partners in developing windfarm electrical distribution is French nuclear giant EDF, which - surprise, surprise - is also a major advocate of eco-mania.

It's here that I get to my main point. Guess who is a paid advisor to EDF? None other than BBC Chairman Lord Patten. Call me a cycnic, but I think that has the makings of rather a nice little scam. The BBC trust publishes a report saying man-made climate change is proven. David Shukman writes admiring, uncritical reports about the development of renewable energy. And the BBC chairman, pockets wodges of cash for advising a green energy developer about strategy. I am not suggesting for a second that our porky EU-loving baron told Mr Shukman what to write...God forbid, that, of course, is not what BBC chairmen do.

But the BBC is undoubtedly a major advocate of climate change and its chairman is pocketing cash for giving advice to an energy supplier which is fanning the flames of climatic alarmism and consuming vast amounts of eco-subsidies. I don't like the smell.

I don't like the smell either.

[Teddy Bear]

As you can see Richard, your observations concerning BBC bias on this topic are shared by many others, and has in fact now made the mainstream media.

Christopher Booker at the Telegraph has more to add on the subject.

The BBC steadfastly avoids the facts about the wind farm scam
David Shukman's reports on energy policy for the BBC failed to explain the true lunacy of the Government's plans.
By Christopher Booker

7:00PM BST 20 Aug 2011

What is the maddest thing going on in Britain today? There may be many competitors for that title, but a front-runner must be what the Government has made the centrepiece of its energy policy, to ensure that our lights stay on and that our now largely computer-dependent economy remains functioning. Last week, the BBC ran a series of reports by its science correspondent, David Shukman, on the Government’s plan to ring our coasts with vast offshore wind farms.

The nearest thing allowed to criticism of this policy came in an interview with the Oxford academic Dieter Helm, who we were told had “done the sums”. What, Shukman asked, had he come up with? The only figures Helm gave were that the Government’s offshore wind farm plans would, by 2020, cost £100 billion – scarcely a state secret, since the Government itself announced this three years ago – plus £40 billion more to connect these windmills to the grid, a figure given us by the National Grid last year.

Helm did not tell us that this £140 billion equates to £5,600 for every household in the country. But he did admit that the plan was “staggeringly expensive”, and that, given the current extent of “fuel poverty” and the state of our economy, he doubted “if it can in fact be afforded”.

Even shorter on hard facts, however, was Shukman’s report on a monster new wind farm off the coast of Cumbria, where a Swedish firm, Vattenfall, has spent £500 million on building 30 five‑megawatt turbines with a total “capacity” of 150MW. What Shukman did not tell us, because the BBC never does, is that, thanks to the vagaries of the wind, these machines will only produce a fraction of their capacity (30 per cent was the offshore average in the past two years). So their actual output is only likely to average 45MW, or £11 million per MW.

Compare this with the figures for Britain’s newest gas-fired power station, recently opened in Plymouth. This is capable of generating 882MW at a capital cost of £400 million – just £500,000 for each megawatt. Thus the wind farm is 22 times more expensive, and could only be built because its owners will receive a 200 per cent subsidy: £40 million a year, on top of the £20 million they will get for the electricity itself. This we will all have to pay for through our electricity bills, whereas the unsubsidised cost of power from the gas plant, even including the price of the gas, will be a third as much.

It is on the basis of such utterly crazy sums – which neither the Government nor the BBC ever mention – that our politicians intend us to pay for dozens of huge offshore wind farms. In a sane world, no one would dream of building power sources whose cost is 22 times greater than that of vastly more efficient competitors. But the Government feels compelled to do just this because it sees it as the only way to meet our commitment to the EU that within nine years Britain must generate nearly a third of its electricity from “renewable” sources, six times more than we do at present.

The insanity does not end here. The Government talks of building 10,000 windmills capable of generating up to 25,000MW of the electricity we need. But when it does so, it – like the BBC – invariably uses that same trick of referring to “capacity”, without explaining that their actual output would be well below 30 per cent. (Last year, onshore turbines generated just 21 per cent of their capacity.) In other words, for all that colossal expenditure – and even if there was the remotest chance that two new giant turbines could be built every day between now and 2020 – we could only hope to generate some 6,000MW. This is not only way below our EU target, it is only a tenth of our peak demand during those cold, windless weeks last winter, when wind power was often providing barely 1 per cent of the power we needed.

To keep the lights on during such times, for every new megawatt of wind capacity we build it will be necessary for to build a megawatt of capacity from gas-fired stations, kept wastefully running 24/7, chucking out carbon dioxide. This will add further billions to the bill we shall all have to pay, while ensuring that wind power does nothing whatever to reduce our overall emission of CO2. But this, again, is another thing that the Government and the BBC are careful never to tell us. Madness is far too polite a word.

[richard111]

I used to read the Telegraph every day of the week. Now I only get the Sunday Telegraph just to read Christopher Booker. He is not the only one to publish common sense articles in the MSM but nothing ever seems to come of it. (?)
One item missing from the wonderful wind farms report is the switching required to keep the distribution of power around the country stable when the gales in Scotland die down for a moment or two and sudden hearty gusts blow up along the south east coast. I can see the UK ending up like India with voltage surges between 400 and 100 volts. Going to play havoc with the TV pictures.

[Teddy Bear]

A Simpsons episode comes to mind where they got a wind generator, and the hilarious results when the power went down at the most inopportune times.

Priceless!

[richard111]

Teddy, for the life of me I cannot find the source of your 'hours worked' image above. I would like to refer to it on another blog but need the original link. I have the link to the .gif, its the article supporting the image I can't find. Many thanks.

[Teddy Bear]

Here you go matey - and you're welcome
Three Steps to build a wind farm

[richard111]

Doh! They added to the link I posted above. Step 3 now available. Teach me!

[Teddy Bear]

;D

[Teddy Bear]

A new fact about wind farms I discovered today, and certainly not from any BBC website or newscast. Apparently if requested to stop producing electricity for any length of time by the National Grid, they are paid 10 times the amount that they would have been paid if they had operated normally. Just one of these farms, Crystal Rig II received £1.2 MILLION to stop operating for 8.5 hours. The article in yesterday's Telegraph goes on to tell us In total, 11 wind farms were closed down last week, receiving a total of £2.6 million. The money - detailed in calculations provided by National Grid - will be added on to household bills and paid for by consumers.

As Britain pushes for more and more wind farms, critics claim the size of the 'constraint payments' will grow accordingly - raising serious concern about the long-term suitability of wind power to meet Britain's energy needs.

Crystal Rig received by far the largest single payment because the National Grid runs an auction, inviting energy companies to say how much they want in compensation for switching off.

Crystal Rig's owners asked for £999 per megawatt hour of energy they would have produced had they been switched on. Incredibly, the figure Crystal Rig had bid was accepted by the National Grid.

Had the turbines remained on, Crystal Rig's owners would have received the going rate of about £100 per megawatt hour instead. Half of that is in the form of a generous consumer subsidy.

Now you think information like this would be relevant to any debate about the practicality and effectiveness of wind farms in generating electricity, and that the BBC would be first to give us that information.

In another life!

Instead the BBC makes sure to tell us how one of the most spectacular vistas to be seen in this country, The Lake District, might be blighted by the pylons taking electricity from more wind farms. But no problem for the BBC as they voice a solution, pay a lot more money to put the cables underground.

With their guaranteed income constantly rising with any rate of inflation, and no cares of how much energy costs rise, what does it matter that generating electricity by this dubious source is totally impracticable and inefficient.

That's without even the following consideration - the supposed purpose of wind farms according to the bleeding heart greenies is to protect the planet. So instead of enjoying the nature that we have we will blight the landscape with huge wind-generators and pylons across the horizon.

From this - To this -

In another article about a bid to build another wind farm, the BBC don't tell you any of the negatives involved with this, just that '...the plant could produce renewable energy for "approximately 26,500 homes".'

[Teddy Bear]

Here's an article to show first how the government gets money through stealth taxes to support their 'green' agenda, and by funding the various completely inefficient schemes to generate this 'green' energy, how much money is wasted - unless you're the one getting the money to implement these idiot schemes.

Though we've mentioned quite a bit on these forums, that considering the anti-Conservative/pro-Labour bias demonstrated daily by the BBC, the conclusion has been that the Conservatives lacked enough gumption to end the farce of the national broadcaster.

With stories like these however, I'm beginning to realise that any government in power sees the BBC as its own propaganda machine, and maintaining the spin on issues like 'global warming', can be used to further the greed and corruption that seems to be running this country.

For sure you won't find the facts detailed below on any BBC webpage on the subject.

The answer, my friend, ain't blowing' in the wind

By Richard Littlejohn

Following the revelation that we’re all paying a secret stealth tax to subsidise so-called renewable energy sources, it seems like a good time to check out exactly what we are getting for our money.

At midday yesterday, wind power was contributing just 2.2 per cent of all the electricity in the National Grid. You might think that’s a pretty poor return on the billions of pounds spent already on Britain’s standing army of windmills.

But it’s actually a significant improvement on the last time I checked the wholesale electricity industry’s official website. At the turn of the year, the figure was 1.6 per cent. During the cold snap the turbines had to be heated to stop them freezing and were actually consuming more electricity than they generated.

Even on a good day, they rarely work above a quarter of their theoretical capacity. And in high winds they have to be turned off altogether to prevent damage. Britain’s 3,426 wind turbines produce no more electricity than a single, medium-sized gas-fired power station.

Any sane individual would conclude that wind generation is hopelessly inefficient and horribly expensive and stop throwing good money after bad.
But when did sanity ever have anything to do with government policy?

Ministers are planning to install another 12,500 of these worse-than-useless windmills, some of them up to three times the size of existing monstrosities.

We are paying for all this through hidden charges which now make up a fifth of all gas and electricity bills. The average household has to fork out an extra £100 a year.

That’s because the Government forces energy companies to buy from renewable sources, which are far more expensive than conventional power stations. The cost is then passed on to the consumer.

Ministers know there would be an outcry if they raised taxes to pay for windmills, so they hide the subsidies in our gas and electricity bills and hope the energy companies get the blame.

Scottish Power has just announced it is increasing gas prices by 19 per cent and electricity by 10 per cent. Although there is little the companies can do about rising world commodity prices, our bills are being artificially inflated as a direct result of the Government’s insane ‘climate change’ policies.

At a time when the price of everything from petrol to basic foodstuffs is going through the roof, it is outrageous that ministers are piling on the misery by forcing all of us to pay well over the odds for domestic fuel.
Here’s how crazy it is.

Earlier this year the National Grid was forced to pay £900,000 compensation to the owners of six wind farms which were forced to close down one especially gusty night — because they were producing too much electricity and there was no capacity to store it.

So they’re either producing little or no electricity, or else have to be switched off because they’re producing too much. Either way, we pay.

It’s not just windmills, either. Farmers are being offered £50,000 to cover their fields with solar panels, which are useless when the sun don’t shine.

Given that we are told we could soon be facing food shortages, you might have thought it would make sense to encourage farmers to grow crops.

But with a guaranteed annual return far higher than if he grew wheat, you can’t blame Farmer Giles for concluding it’s not worth getting his hands dirty and taking the money.

Lavish subsidies for renewable energy schemes are also making some of the country’s richest landowners even richer at the taxpayers’ expense.

Meanwhile, manufacturing industry faces a 70 per cent increase in its fuel bills — regardless of the level of world energy prices — because of a reckless levy on carbon emissions imposed by the Coalition’s tame racing driver. Some say he ran off with a lapsed lesbian and that he persuaded his ex-wife to take the rap for a speeding offence. All we know is: he’s called Chris Huhne.
Is it worth it? Looks good, but just how far are we in position to utilise solar power to its maximum

The Lib Dem Energy Secretary epitomises the political establishment’s obsession with ‘man-made global warming’. Climate change has given them a catch-all excuse to grab more power and raise taxes.

Don’t take my word for it. Tony Blair’s former Cabinet Secretary, Lord Turnbull, has condemned MPs and civil servants for punishing hard-working families and jeopardising economic growth in the name of saving the polar bears.

He said: ‘We need more open-mindedness, more rationality, less emotion and less religiosity and an end to the alarmist propaganda and to attempts to frighten us and our children.’

Amen to that.

Why should Britain have the world’s toughest targets for cutting carbon emissions, especially when China is opening a new coal-fired power station every week? Meeting those targets will take £13 billion a year out of the economy.

Why should British householders, uniquely, be forced to pay higher gas and electricity bills to disfigure our green-and-pleasant with hideous War Of The Worlds windmills, simply so politicians like Huhne can preen themselves at international ‘global warming’ conferences?

It is suicidal to load unnecessary financial burdens on British businesses, which are trying to compete with cut-price Chinese products produced in factories powered by cheap electricity.

It’s not even as if there are tens of thousands of jobs being created in Britain by the ‘green economy’. The wind turbines are all built and installed by foreign firms. British taxpayers are subsidising companies in Germany, Spain and Japan.

My wife recently went for lunch in a Norfolk hotel which was overrun with Scandinavian technicians, living high on the hog, plonking offshore wind farms in the Wash and the North Sea.

Politicians are putting our economic recovery at risk by posturing over ‘global warming’ and dragging their feet over the obvious and urgent solution of building more clean, safe nuclear power stations.

Because of this madness, Britain faces the very real prospect of rolling power cuts in the not-too-distant, as our older generation of power stations come to the end of their lives.

Stuff the polar bears. Unless the politicians get a grip, sky-high gas and electricity bills will be the least of our worries.

[Teddy Bear]

In Scotland yesterday they had gale force winds up to 165mph. For some reason a wind generator burst into flame. Up till today all the BBC had on it was a picture of the incident, part of a gallery of pictures


The BBC have an 'article' on the incident now, and it's become their most viewed for today. It comes with what seems to be an amateur video of the windmill catching fire. There's a short BBC commentary along with it that basically tells you the obvious, and naturally avoids any editorialising. Note no shock horror in the article itself at the first line, which, if it would have been an issue that the BBC were against, we can be sure a counter would have appeared.

Storm caused wind turbine fire
9 December 2011 Last updated at 14:27 Help
Renewable energy experts today dismissed an incident where a wind turbine caught fire in gale force winds as a "freak" occurrence.
The 328ft (100m) tall turbine, at Ardrossan Wind Farm, near the A78 in North Ayrshire, was destroyed after it exploded into flames.
The BBC's James Cook said the flames could be seen for miles around.

2 million quids worth of public money up in flames, on an anyway controversial agenda - and the BBC allows 'just dismiss it - it's a 'freak' occurrence' to salve our concern. This is the BBC serving their public.

[cherenkov]

Please check out the lead below, if only to be shocked by looking at the disturbing images of what wind turbines do to birds.
www.savewesternny.org/wildlife.html
To me wind turbines make no sense whatever. They are too expensive to build, they offend our inherent aesthetic appreciation of the countryside, and most importantly of all, to me anyway, they kill birds and bats. Out at sea windblown seabirds, many endangered like shearwaters and terns may be being killed and/or mutilated by them. Unlike on land, where the corpses are left to rot at the foot of the pylon, out at sea they will be washed away.
Therefore I cannot see how anyone will be able to establish how many birds will be slaughtered by these offshore wind farms. Thus it is impossible for anyone to claim they are acceptable in terms of wildlife safety.
The reason politicians and their cronies in the BBC etc like wind farms is because they are big and conspicuous and show that they can 'be seen to be doing something about climate change'.

Also, leaders, whether religious, political, fascist, Nazist, monarchist, socialist or communist... are attracted by big structures that make ordinary people look and feel small and humble in comparison.
In the past this has meant vast cathedrals, temples, mosques, statues, palaces, state buildings, pyramids etc.
Now wind turbines are become the new symbolic mega-architecture of the present day we can add them onto the above list.
How is it that all of this is so crystal clear to all of us here and yet the BBC's thinking on the matter is at very best muddled?
I would have used more critical language had it not been for watching the last episode of Ice Worlds during the week. Yes it was describing the recent shrinking of the ice caps/shelves at the poles and outlining their significance to climate, sea levels and so on. However there was, for a change, no invocation of anthropogenic global warming as being the cause. So perhaps they are trying to have some kind of a re-think.

[Teddy Bear]

The analogy you describe as an added purpose for building the wind farms is one that hadn't occurred to me, but you may well be right. It would certainly fit with the mentality of those who support them.

I just posted a piece by Christopher Booker commenting about the final programme in the Frozen Planet series, and correcting some of the assertions made by it, which I believe is the same episode you are referring to.

[cherenkov]

Well I'm glad that my assertion that for the first time in a long time 'the hand of Man' was not implicated directly. However the observations Sir David described are real enough, and though the Milankovitch cycles provide a significant extraterrestrial and thus non-anthropogenic involvement, as well as the solar cycles the longer trends of which we are still studying, I think the programme was using a tactic of guilt by omission.

I don't care whether the BBC or anyone else believes in anthropogenic global warming or not. As a species we are all too corrupted in one way or another to ever form the necessary consensus of agreement.
If this leads to human extinction because we couldn't understand the meaning of a simple word 'FINITE' as per the resources of this planet and the limits on our ability to exploit it's resources, such that our population goes on replicating exponentially due to our collective inability or unwillingness to face up to the meaning of such a simple word, then so much the better-we deserve nothing else.
This planet has billions more years to produce another intelligent species who, on realising they were not the first, will stand a much better chance of making the decisions necessary to create a stable platform on which population and resource availability are held in balance.
Anyone possessed of a crumb of insight can see that this can never be us, so our our Easter Island-style extinction by resource depletion is to me inevitable. Sad yes, but I think I got over it around the time of Chernobyl. It doesn't matter to me.

What matters is that scientific probabilities of the sort I've just alluded to are not promoted by the BBC and others as scientific certainties. In the days I subscribed to the Nature journal I recall an editorial that said if the scientists project too pessimistic a picture then people won't bother to make the changes and sacrifices that are necessary to avoid extinction. Unlike Nature I actually think we've been in that phase already for some time.
No wonder the custodians at the BBC are confused- it's not nice when your whole life you were the kind of asshole that thought they knew all the answers, only to have to face up to a truly cosmic, existential problem that all your arrogance and sanctimony just haven't prepared you for!

Read more: biasedbbc.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=hotair&thread=1597&page=1#ixzz1gGklNbDH

[Teddy Bear]

I replied to this post where you cross-posted it here Cher

[cherenkov]

Sorry.