Worthless and worse wind

My friend Parker Gallant has written on my updated estimates of annual curtailment in Wind waste should worry Ontario ratepayers.  Producing the estimates doesn’t take me nearly the effort Parker puts into writing on them, so I felt compelled to add a new view of the data just to make our contributions a little more equitable.

The French language Radio-Canada has posted AU PAYS DE L’EAU NOIRE
Des résidents en Ontario vivent un cauchemar depuis l’installation d’éoliennes proches de leur domicile. I assume it’s best read in French, but the Google translation to English sufficed for me. As the journalism at Radio-Canada is more focused on the impacts to people of turbine construction of the North Kent wind farm, I decided today’s show of data will be on the performance of individual industrial wind turbine facilities.

Capacity Factor is the output of a generator divided by the theoretical maximum (full output in all hours). To estimate costs I need to estimate curtailment, but just viewing the history of capacity factors has the benefit of allowing the cynical reader (ie. the good ones) to verify my claims just by adding up columns from the IESO’s wind file. I won’t make it easy to do though, because for fairness I limit results to years where a facility was in commercial operation throughout, and to compare 2017 results I’ve made all years’ data the total as of the end of November.

Advertisement

Health, Impact studies, and negligence

An anticipated Health Canada study on Industrial Wind Turbine Noise is noted by anti-victim wind promoter Simon Chapman in a new article in Australia.

Chapman opines there are no problems with industrial wind turbines except for the problems with the whiny sorts that pretend to be bothered by them:

“In this Health Canada study, while proximity to the turbines was statistically significantly associated with annoyance, the relationship was weak. It was better explained by factors such as holding negative views about the visual impact of the turbines (not liking the look of them), being able to the see aircraft warning blinking lights, the perception of vibrations when the turbines were turning and high concern about physical safety. These are all perceptual variables that bothered some…”

but also…

“The prevalence of residents reporting that they were very or extremely annoyed by wind turbine noise increased from 2.1% to 13.7% when sound pressure levels were below 30 dB compared to when the noise was between 40–46 dB.”

as over 40 dB annoyance is much higher, I feel obligated to note a couple of pieces I’ve encountered in the past on the Ontario government ignoring the 40 dB limit:

The MOE and David Libby is an excellent 2013 post – one of many from Wayne at the Wind Farm Realities site. That post references work by John Harrison, as well as a post I assembled for Wind Concerns Ontario:Health, Impact studies, and negligence. The first quote I included in that post is from Belgium’s Superior Health Council:

The noise levels due to the operation of wind turbines and wind farms near people’s homes should comply with the World Health Organisation (WHO) and WHO Europe guidelines for daytime and night-time noise exposure in order to avoid serious annoyance and (self-reported) sleep disturbance. This would lead to sound levels below 45 dB(A) during day-time and 40 dB(A) at night.

I realize there are lot of disagreements on wind issues, but the one on sound levels above 40 dB really shouldn’t be about whether the wind turbines are the problem or the people impacted by Industrial wind are problems.