The news piece about expanding British Columbia’s electricity needs is so bogus and defies credulity.
After Site C is added to the grid (at a current cost of at least $9 billion) the base load will be 16.9 GW. As the article notes, a further 20.1 GW needs to be added. And there is no other Site C in the works. That 20.1 GW would translate to more than $164.5 billion and another Site C coming on stream every 1.5 years for the next 30 years!
Of course that won’t happen, instead wind turbines will begin to pollute the landscape all over the province. How many? Well, real world application demonstrates wind turbines have, at best, a 30-40% efficiency, meaning that 8,040 2.5 GW turbines would still not meet the needs. Can you picture every mountain in BC with a wind turbine atop its peak?
Moreover, real world experience shows that even tripling the boilerplate capacity (i.e. over 24,000 wind turbines) still doesn’t do the job because the wind is always intermittent. So a functional 37 GW simply cannot be realized with green energy. (And solar in northern latitudes is no better.)
The costs of erecting over 8,000 wind turbines, the roads, infrastructure, transmission lines, the environmental degradation and destruction, the killing of massive numbers of birds, bats and insects, the human health costs from infrasound, not to mention the enormous costs to mine, transport, manufacture, transport to site, and later remove, recycle and remediate are deliberately not entered into the calculus.
Nor has the fact that real world experience is that wind turbines do not last as long as their propagandists would have the public believe. In Germany, they are finding 10-15 years is more realistic (vs. 60-plus for hydro, which is limited by available sites, and 45-60 year for coal or natural gas).
In addition, if 37 GW is considered a necessary base load, then what will supply the makeup capacity between existing hydro power sources when the wind doesn’t blow? Remember, solar cannot make up the real world difference either. The only thing would be to build dozens of gas-fired power plants, which would, by necessity because of standby mode, operate inefficiently much of the time but ready to fire up on a moment’s notice. Add in the infrastructure and engineering to avoid the kinds of catastrophes California has experienced, and once again the costs skyrocket.
In short, this is a deliberately misleading propaganda report that whitewashes the true picture, its costs and its real world impacts upon ordinary British Columbians.
Germany, which has led the way in wind energy, is finding it simply cannot continue to subsidize the enormous costs. And neither can B.C. ratepayers.
Source: Castanet
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