We’re spitting into the wind with focus on renewables

IN addition to chopping up the odd bird, wind turbines can also be too noisy, damaging human hearing and health. Who would have thought?

And so, as well as pocketing billions of dollars from taxpayers, and from consumers via higher power bills, too much renewable generation – both the bird-frying solar variety and the bird-chopping wind – will, according to energy groups AGL and Origin, threaten to make for “volatile energy supply”. Again, who could possibly have thought?

Certainly not the very same AGL, which has been recently trumpeting it was “getting out of coal” – and, thus, would go for more and more renewable generation. How does that “contradiction” work?

It’s a contradiction that, incidentally, should prompt any consumer with a functioning brain to respond: “Well, if AGL is getting out of sensible power generation, I’m going to get out of AGL.”

The rational thing to do is to switch to an alternative provider that doesn’t want to commit to making electricity less reliable and more expensive.

AGL has also explicitly revealed it wants to “manage your supply” when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine – by turning off your airconditioning on hot days and your heating on cold ones.

The World Health Organisation can’t be dismissed as some crazy climate denialist that’s anti-wind.

For the first time – according to Graham Lloyd at our sister paper The Australian – WHO has made recommendations on wind turbines, explicitly on the basis that the noise they generate can harm human health. WHO, according to Lloyd, conditionally recommended “reducing noise levels produced by wind turbines below 45dB”.

This is actually higher than the maximum level – 40dB – set by, for example, Victoria’s EPA. So can we conclude our hearing’s safe or, at least, safer?

Well, actually no. The Victorian limit is actually 40dB or 5dB above the “background level, whichever is higher”.

AGL and Origin comment that renewable energy will not only dangerously destabilise the grid but, worse, have a cascading volatility effect.

And we propose to multiply tenfold the number of these turbines. If we are that stupid, we deserve what we will get: noise without power.