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Wednesday 21 August 2013

2.5 Hour Debate - Two Weeks of Energy from Wind

I came across an interesting story via the Yes2Renewables blog yesterday:
"The Coalition candidate for Corangamite Sarah Henderson‘s support for renewable energy is in question as it was revealed she endorses Ted Baillieu’s controversial anti-wind farm laws."
Specifically, an article in the Surf Coast Times stated that:
"In relation to the state government’s two kilometre buffer zone on wind farm development, Ms Henderson said she was in favour. “I actually think the policy on wind is a very good one, because wind was dividing so many rural communities.”"
Yes2Renewables do a good job pointing out that community opposition to wind farms is often overblown - we're exposed to an unrepresentative sample, because news outlets (and anti-wind campaigners) tend to amplify conflict. A happy community is the biggest threat to anti-wind campaigners.

Something else that's often forgotten is the contribution of renewable energy, in the simple terms of how much energy they contribute to the grid. I recently wrote about this for Renew Economy - during science week, wind supplied 47% of South Australia's electricity needs. It's not always that high (sometimes it's lower, and sometimes it's higher), but it's a good example of how the successes of wind energy are often ignored.

Falling in that period was the night of the candidates debate, at which Sarah Henderson made her comments supporting Victoria's astonishingly draconian wind energy setback laws. The event was held on the 13th of August, at 19:30 AEST - let's assume it ran until 10pm. We can chart wind generation against the estimated average power consumption of Corangamite (north and south), and Melbourne (inner, Southbank, Docklands and 'Remainder'):

Clique to embiggen
Or, for a slightly prettier version:


I've shaded in the debate period red in the first version. If you sum the energy produced during the red period, it adds up to 1,989 megawatt hours. Corangamite (North and South) consumes ~121 megawatts hours of energy per day, so, using the power produced by Victorian wind farms during the debate, you could power Corangamite for more than a fortnight.

Just sayin'.

Raw data here

Thursday 15 August 2013

FEATURE QUALITY THE SOURCE NEW

So, I recently found a brilliant website, named 'Trong Dong Energy'.

The page begins with a bang - the 'diagram' at the top quite literally incorporates a laser gun (which is situated in a shopping trolley) shooting down a WW2 plane, a helicopter, a flying tank, and seemingly, a mountain - none of which seems related to the generator in any way whatsoever.

Clique to embiggens

The 'High Speed Win Turbine' (misspelling or brilliant pun?) is '4,8MW/H'. Contained within those seven characters is so much wrongness that any human being with even the slightest knowledge of physics or engineering would curl into the foetal position and begin quietly weeping on the floor, clawing gently at their own face.

So why should we invest in Trong Dong Energy?

"DETERMINATION TO FOR THE ENVIRONMENT - GREEN FOR EVERYONE - IT WAS ONLY ONE FLOOR- IF SUPERIMPOSED ON SEVERAL LEVELS - CAPACITY QUICKLY ENORMOUS"

Agh, why are is everyone yelling? Anyway, that makes sense to me. I've always wondered why we don't just build coal-fired power stations on top of one another, because, if we did, capacity quickly enormous, and, BAM, no more energy crisis, bitches.

But, why should we choose Trong Dong, over more conventional forms of wind power?
"IT IS LOCATED IN A CLOSED CYCLE -NOT TOO NOISY - NOT INTERFERE WITH THE DIRECTION OF THE WIND - WHO SAYS WIND TURBINES DO NOT AFFECT THE ENVIRONMENT - IS WRONG TO - ENORMOUS - WILL CAUSE MORE DAMAGING TORNADOES TO EVERYONE - I DEFINITELY WILL SO"
South Australia has Australia's largest installed capacity for wind energy. In fact, the past few days, it's been going nuts - on Wednesday, it consistently generated more than 60% of the state's total electrical power for most of the day. Which is why South Australia looked something like this. 

"ARGH, STOP MAKING WIND TURBINES" - Helen Hunt
To be fair, the author does seem sincere, but it's odd how regularly the purveyors of prototype wind turbines need to resort to bashing the classic 3-bladed design to try and push their wares - see the curious case of Saphon Energy, and their moronic appeal to 'Wind Turbine Syndrome' as a reason to invest in their product.

Some of my favourite pictures of the Trong Dong Device:


BREAKFAST. BEAUTY. THE MAGNIFICENT. 

Sunday 11 August 2013

Anonymous Racist Mockery

I don't sound like I look. I was born in London, and moved to Sydney when I was eight. My parents are North Indian, but they were born in Kenya. Identity, culture and race are important to a lot of people, but they do less for me than the average human being, I suspect.

There is much more to me than the pigmentation of my rubbery outer layer. In fact, making a generalisation about someone based on this physical feature is delusional, and appealing to race when trying to offend or insult is profoundly lame. 

So, I was having a glance at the latest post from 'Stop These Things', an anonymous anti-wind blog with an unambiguous agenda: 
"We are not here to debate the wind industry – we are here to destroy it."
A few months back, they included me on their 'These People Don't Get It' page, but not after failing to check their facts before publishing them. They also listed the 'followers' of a fake Twitter account, but used a screenshot of the 'Following' list. Frequent failure is no impediment - anonymity means the author can quite literally publish anything, about anyone, and face no repercussion. Their most recent post is, in my eyes, a good example of this. 

Toying with the benefits of anonymous racism

Rogan Josh is a popular Kashmiri Indian dish. It's a direct, punny taunt related to my race (determined, surely, from one my many selfies). This isn't the first time I've seen a weirdly irrelevant reference to race when it comes to wind energy. This example is taken from a post on an American anti-wind website: 


Perhaps a more relevant example is the curious case of the anonymous twitter troll '@Journo_realdeal' - still tweeting fierce racist, homophobic and sexist abuse. A few months back, I tweeted something to both him and journalist George Megalogenis, but honestly, I can't remember what it was (the original thread has been deleted). The response of the anonymous troll, though, was stored by software engineering student Dan Nolan on Storify


Racist taunts are curiously jarring. I wonder if the author of 'Stop These Things' would have used the taunt were it not for the advantages afforded by anonymity, or the unchecked ease of typing words into a computer. 

It's clear one of the main aims of the blogger is to incite, irk and irritate members of the wind industry - hence, a focus on condescension and insult. Being reduced to one's race is unnerving, and having one's family name used as a racist jibe actually feels truly rancid. 

Thursday 8 August 2013

Knocking Health Practitioners Off Their Feet- The Ad Agency and the Anti-wind Group

The Waubra Foundation, Australia's key player in the spread of health fears around wind energy, have stepped up their efforts - a flashy new website has popped up, adorned with brazen statements in which they directly appeal to health professionals - an unambiguous effort to recruit GPs and doctors to the cause of anti-wind efforts:



Digging into the page in which they claim to have proof of a direct causal relationship between wind turbines and health effects, the content devolves from neatly presented graphics to conspiratorial prolix:
"Rather, the wind industry and its acousticians are well aware of the symptoms and their cause, which was shown by Kelley et al to be directly related to infrasound and low frequency noise in laboratory experiments generating the noise and testing the effects on volunteers."
The theory that the wind industry has been conspiring to suppress Kelley's research on wind turbines since the late 80's seems to have taken off in recent weeks, despite the fact that the machine referred to in Kelley's research was a prototype, and that indoor noise testing from modern wind turbines (the largest machines in Australia) shows nearly no alteration to low-frequency and infrasonic noise levels before and after operation.

The 'Resident Impact Videos' are an attempt to circumvent diagnosis by registered health professionals. Through the collation of video testimony, the Foundation shifts the focus away from science and heaves it towards emotional impact, hoping viewers will assume a causal link between the very real health problems of residents, and the ominous presence of wind turbines.

The Waubra Foundation seem to have no qualms with circumventing the Victorian Department of Health, the NSW Department of Health, the South Australian Environmental Protection Agency and the National Health and Medical Research Council, by reaching out directly to health practitioners and asking them to partake in what I suspect is a deeply unethical practice - telling residents that their symptoms are caused by wind turbines, when there is no evidence that this is the case.

So, who's behind Waubra's brazen and polished efforts to circumvent public health and inject their own reality, of cover-ups and secret wind industry phone-tapping conspiracies, into contemporary medicine?

A quick domain check gives us the answer:


The website was registered by Cam Lee of Grant Day James - an ad agency based in Sydney and Melbourne.
"TV, Radio, Direct Mail, Press, Web, Print and Point of Sale, you name it. You can’t really pigeon-hole GDJ."
No, you certainly can't. The old .com.au address is still registered to Susan Ghent from Lowell Resources - an investment firm with interests in 'mining and energy companies'. From the Waubra Foundation's new 'Information for Residents Page':
"In the case of wind turbines, in some locations residents have noticed batteries on phones, cars, tractors, and cameras discharging very quickly, flourescent light bulbs lighting up spontaneously and electricity meters spinning much more quickly despite homes being abandoned and little electricity being used."
"Residents have also noticed quite marked rapid fluctuations in air pressure when outside, especially within 1 – 2km of operating wind turbines, sufficient to knock them off their feet or bring some men to their knees when out working in their paddock, and have been reported by farmers to perceptibly rock stationary cars."
These claims seem to surpass implausibility, landing ceremoniously in the realm of sorcery. They highlight the risks of the Waubra Foundation hiring an ad agency to draw in a greater crowd. Though their graphical layout may be slightly easier on the eye, the content they publish is still a blurred, horrendous mish-mash of odd claims and extremely dangerous medical misinformation.

Recently, an anti-wind group on King Island hired a PR firm to add a sheen of professionalism to their objections. The Waubra Foundation's newly polished efforts to circumvent the system of public health and feed misinformation into modern medicine are truly unnerving.

Monday 5 August 2013

You Being a Man of Science

On the night of May 28th, Greens MLC Mark Parnell pitched a tent directly underneath a wind turbine at Waterloo Wind Farm, and had a relatively peaceful night’s rest. Prior to his camping experience, Parnell was interviewed on ABC’s Breakfast Reloaded by Matthew Abraham and David Bevan:
Host: Mark Parnell, you being a man of science, why would you say that camping within 100 metres of the pole is going to give you an experience that people who live a kilometre away will experience?
The assertion that sound energy from a wind turbine will somehow be greater at a distance of one kilometre away and inside a house, compared to 100 metres away and inside a tent, is a good example of the homeopathic logic that characterises discourse around wind energy.

The "Inverse Square Law": As you move further away from a sound source, the noise level decreases by the square of the distance. Things get quieter as you move away from them, not louder.

Parnell tries (several times) during the interview to point out that Waterloo is comprised of more than one wind turbine, and consequently, he would have been at varying distances from several machines during his stay. His efforts were in vain. The hosts then interview a man named Bob, living 10 kilometres away from Waterloo Wind Farm:
Bob: I've been opposed to these things from way back. Anything of this scale, from an ecological point of view, is just wrong. 
Bob tries diverting the topic away from noise and towards birds, and the host patiently tries to steer him back:
Host: If I could just ask you about the noise, what can you hear right now?
Bob: Well, it’s like an agitator sound. It appears….well it does appear like it is just in my head, because my partner can’t hear it but at times she can hear it, and I can’t…it’s a perplexing thing, because you get two people in a house and they hear it completely differently, we describe it differently...
The interview is hastily cut short, but not before Bob has inadvertently highlighted an important fact about perception – subjectivity plays a significant role in how we perceive sound. 

Research has shown that attitudes towards wind farms is a reliable predictor of how one will react to them - in this case, Bob states explicitly that he's always been 'opposed to these things', and then goes on to describe the tenuous sensation he attributes to the wind farm. 

This effect is not bound by distance. The host also interviews Mary Morris, a motivated opponent of wind energy, living 17 kilometres from Waterloo. He brings up recent research, work he characterises as suggesting ‘wind turbine syndrome’ is ‘all in the mind’:
Mary Morris: It’s definitely not in the mind, and especially when you've got children who are affected, as I have, in the vicinity of the turbines when your child gets a headache and an earache and when you go away it stops, my child isn't making that up.
17 kilometres is a fair distance. To put this in perspective, this is the same as living in Parramatta and being affected by traffic noise (which is significantly louder than a wind turbine - Edit: to clarify, at a distance of 350m) in the Sydney CBD, or arriving at Melbourne airport and being irritated by construction work in the Melbourne CBD. Even in a quiet environment, with little background noise, wind farm infrasound and low-frequency noise is extremely unlikely to be detectable at that distance.

Wind farm noise modelling gives us a fairly accurate picture of acoustic emissions, but attitudinal factors can cause a wildly disparate community response

The radio piece seemed to summarise one enormously important point about wind energy - the sensation of hearing must always be interpreted by the machinery of perception inside our brain. We have to consider the role of attitude, anxiety and belief in the perception of sound, in conjunction with measurements and analysis. These factors might give us a better understanding of why perception seems to vary so wildly from measurements, engineering and science.

After the protestations of another parliamentary committee member, three MLCs and a Nine journalist stayed a night in an 'abandoned' house, a few kilometres from the wind farm. The outcome:
"Neighbours insist the sound and vibrating fury of the turbines seeps into your synapses, causing headaches and palpitations and destroying the sanctity of your nightly repose.
Personally, I couldn't hear a thing above the snoring resonating from the rooms around me"
Thanks to David Clarke's great blog for some inspiration for this post. 

Thursday 1 August 2013

Walking and Driving: The Hidden Dangers

Sitting comfortably? Probably. That's because you're cushioned by the soft, warm pillow of complacent ignorance. I've recently found that nearly all of humanity is in mortal danger, and you don't even care, do you?

The Associate Director of Resonate Acoustics gave a presentation at Clean Energy Week 2013 last week, that I found pretty unnerving. If anti-wind lobby is right in their assertion that infrasound has an effect on human physiology at the low levels produced by wind turbines, then we're all going to have to consider some fairly drastic consequences.

Click to embiggen
Infrasound is sound below a frequency of twenty hertz. As you can see above, you can't hear it unless it's very, very loud. Human beings have been awash in low levels of infrasound for millions of years, and we still are. Resonate demonstrated this with some simple measurements:

Something that may make robots slightly nervous.
Yep, by simply walking around, you're exposing yourself to a higher amplitude of infrasound than you would if you were near inside a house near a wind farm (which, according to opponents of wind energy, is worse than sleeping directly underneath a turbine). 

The average human walks around 56,327 kilometres in their lifetime. At an average walking speed of 4.51 km/h, we spend ~12,489 hours, during our lifetime, walking. Using an average of 2.3 km per day, yesterday, 22,320,000 Australians walked a cumulative  ~51,256,468 kilometres. That's 1,279 trips around Earth. 

Basically, it's a shitload of walking, all of which seems to occur without spawning the symptoms of 'Wind Turbine Syndrome'. 

If that wasn't bad enough, the acousticians also placed their equipment in a car, and measured infrasound:

Again, an issue not limited to humans.
As you'd expect, the amplitude of infrasound you're exposed to whilst driving in a car is significantly higher than your exposure to infrasound near a wind farm. Interestingly, a car moving at 60 km/h with the rear windows down can actually produce audible infrasound, greater than 100 dB. The author of the presentation tells me that their work has been submitted for review. 

So, next time you hear of anti-wind groups travelling to towns and attempting to create fear and uncertainty around renewable energy, based on the invisible threat of infrasound, think back to the last time you walked down the street. Did you experience any of the 216 symptoms attributed to exposure to low levels of infrasound? Probably not.