wind farms

Jo Nova: NIMBY Bob Brown Says Wind Farms Are Ugly

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The hypocrisy of environmentalists in general, and Greens politicians in particular, is always a source of bemusement. Bob Brown is a great proponent of wind farms in other places.

Jo Nova writes

Former Greens leader Bob Brown campaigns against wind farm

Do we need wind farms to save the world or not? Not, says Bob Brown.

People can have sleep and health and their views destroyed, but that didn’t matter til a farmer on a remote island off Tasmania made a deal to build one of the largest wind “farms” in the world.

Graham Lloyd, The Australian

Former Greens leader and veteran activist Bob Brown is campaigning to stop a $1.6 billion wind farm development in Tasmania because it will spoil the view and kill birds.

The proposed Robbins Island wind farm in Tasmania’s northwest will be one of the world’s biggest, with up to 200 towers measuring 270m high from ground to blade tip.

He’s written a letter protesting about the view:

Despite the criticisms levelled at former prime minister Tony Abbott and treasurer Joe Hockey for describing wind turbines as “ugly”, Dr Brown said the Robbins Island plan was, visually, a step too far. “Mariners will see this hairbrush of tall towers from 50km out to sea and elevated landlubbers will see it, like it or not, from greater distances on land,” Dr Brown said. “Its eye-catchiness will divert from every coastal scene on the western Bass Strait coastline.”

So Tony Abbott was right. It will be good to hear that apology.

After millions of birds bats and who-knows-what-else has been killed, now he cares:

In his letter on the wind farm, Dr Brown wrote: “Besides the impact on the coastal scenery, wind turbines kill birds. Wedge-tailed eagle and white-bellied sea eagles nest and hunt on the island. Swift parrots and orange-bellied parrots traverse the island on their migrations.”

The birds are just a “beside”.

Reap what you sow — a belief based on superstition with no underlying principles means sooner or later Greens reveal their inner hypocrite.

The ABC reported on this project in Dec 2017. The industrial wind plant was only going ahead if they could also build a second interconnector across the Bass Strait, something the company said it would pay for if it got approval. For some strange reason the Tasmanian Government was spending $20m investigating the business case first…

Why are taxpayers worried about a business case if the company was the one risking the money?

The Hammond family farm high quality Wagyu beef.

 Robbins Island farmer John Hammond sees the wind farm as a way to keep the Island in the family.

For his sake, we hope cows do better than people do when assailed by infrasound from giant machines. John Hammonds kids may inherit a farm where no animal thrives. Some “farm”.

The ABC also report that the same company, UPC Renewables, raised the ire of Tasmanians two weeks ago regarding a 170km proposed transmission line. The company said they’d consulted and most people were “on board”. But people were not and just three days later the boss changed his tune saying he “misread the people”.

The ABC have not mentioned Bob Brown yet.

New Study Shows Wind Farms Are Noisy

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With the rush on for so-called renewable energy, you would think that there would be heaps of studies on possible side-effects of wind farms such as possible health effects of these monstrosities. Some years ago while I still believed that the ABC was capable of producing genuine information on science, there was a commentator on the Science Show who put down all the complaints to psychology, fear and climate denial.

Apparently there has now been a “world first” study on a tiny sample of houses that has discovered that even several kilometres away there are audible pulses of sound which must have some potential effect when it’s there constantly. Still, somebody has to take a shot to save the planet.

Jo Nov reports:

Finally “world first” study on nine houses shows wind towers make pulsing noise for 3.5 km

Wind Turbine pic near farms. Generic. Gonz - DDl

Generic wind turbine near farm. Photo: @gonz_ddl

Finally, a study looks at data on nine houses within ten kilometers of an old (probably small) wind turbine. What’s amazing about this research is not the result but that this study is so tiny, yet it’s still a “world first”.

There are already probably around400,000 wind turbinesinstalled around the world.* So you might think that there would have been scores of studies involving hundreds of people and followed up for a year or two. They would have looked at the effect of wind turbines upwind, downwind, side wind, in low wind, high wind, and at different times of day. They’d check for altered sleep patterns, lack of deep sleep, REM sleep, cognitive performance, blood pressure, cortisol levels, and school marks. Dream on. It’s like everything with climate change — who needs data?

Renewables are a$300 billion annual global industry. This work was done with a $1.4 million National Health and Medical Research Council grant. Where is the precautionary principle when we need it?

Can wind turbines disturb sleep? Research finds pulsing audible in homes up to 3.5km away

Nicola Hasham,Sydney Morning Herald

…the first results from ongoing Flinders University research into turbine noise and sleep found that low-frequency pulsing from a South Australian wind farm was audible about 16 per cent of the time inside homes up to 3.5 kilometres from a turbine, including 22 per cent of the time at night. The noise was audible 24 per cent of the time outside the homes. Recordings detected what complainants commonly describe as a pulsating, thumping or rumbling sound. The noise is technically known as amplitude modulation, and relates to a change in noise level that occurs approximately once per second as the turbine blade rotates. Field data was recorded at nine homes within 8.8 kilometres of the wind farm. Microphones were placed inside and outside homes and recorded almost 18,000 10-minute samples between 2012 and 2015. The data was recently analysed and the results published online last month in the Journal of Sound and Vibration.

In 2016 the research team was awarded a $1.4 million National Health and Medical Research Council grant for a separate wind farm noise study including lab tests and sleep measurement

If the world put just 0.5% of the annual “renewables investment” into researching the health effects that would be $15m a year.

There have been almost no studies into the health impact of wind farms. Remember the one in 2014 in Australia which was also a world first, andinvolved an eight week study on six people in three houses.It was a tiny study too — why we haven’t done this one hundred times bigger? Are we afraid of what the results might show?

Read the rest of the article here