Tony Abbott brags about halting the spread of 'visually awful' wind farms
With a 22,300-mile coastline, offshore winds and almost perpetual sunshine, Australia could be leading the world in replacing carbon-spewing fossil fuels with renewable-energy sources.
That is unlikely to happen, though, under Tony Abbott, who has proclaimed coal to be “good for humanity” – and who revealed that he detests wind farms, calling them noisy and “visually awful”. To the dismay of the multi-billion-dollar clean-energy sector, and to the mortification of many Australians, Mr Abbott bragged that he had halted the spread of wind farms by slashing the amount of energy to be generated by renewable sources by 2020. Explaining a compromise which he reached with opposition parties in the Senate last month to cut the target by 20 per cent, he told a right-wing radio host, Alan Jones: “What we did recently in the Senate was to reduce… the number of these things [wind farms] we are going to get in the future.” He added: “I frankly would have liked to have reduced the number a lot more. But we got the best deal we could, and if we hadn’t had a deal, we would have been stuck with even more of these things… I’ve been up close to these wind farms, there’s no doubt that not only are they visually awful but they make a lot of noise.”
Tony Abbott told a right-wing radio host that he would like to slash green energy even further The comments were described as “gobsmacking” by the Labor Party, which said they did not augur well for Australia’s participation in the key climate change conference in Paris later this year. Mr Abbott – who abolished a carbon-pricing scheme on coming to power and has dismissed “the climate change argument” as “absolute crap” – is already out of step with other developed nations, such as France and the US, who want more ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions. While he now claims to accept the science behind man-made climate change, his government is considered one of the most environmentally hostile in living memory. It has sanctioned a cull of endangered great white sharks in Western Australia, permitted dredging spoil to be dumped on the Great Barrier Reef and attempted to have ancient Tasmanian forests removed from the World Heritage List. One of Mr Abbott’s first actions, on being elected in 2013, was to order a businessman and leading climate change sceptic, Dick Warburton, to review a renewable energy target set by a previous government. Mr Warburton recommended the target be radically cut. Amid a public backlash, the government was forced to negotiate a more moderate but still substantial reduction with Labor and crossbenchers.
The once thriving renewable energy sector, meanwhile, has been paralysed. According to the Australian Financial Review, hundreds of jobs – and billions of dollars in investment – have been lost because of the uncertainty.
During the radio interview, Mr Abbott also appeared to give credence to concerns about the health impacts of wind turbines – although the government’s own National Health and Medical Research Council reported in February that there was “no consistent evidence” of adverse effects. “I do take your point about the potential health impact of these things,” he told Jones, an outspoken opponent of wind farms. The Australian Wind Alliance, a pro-wind energy group, called his comments “extraordinary”. Mr Abbott had “admitted to setting out deliberately to destroy a viable industry in Australia, one that could provide jobs to many Australians, investment to regional communities and new income to farmers”, it said. Mark Butler, Labor’s environment spokesman, said it was astonishing that the Prime Minister could be “so short-sighted and so out of touch”.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott has signalled that the Coalition would likely have scrapped Australia's renewable energy target if it had controlled the Senate to stop the expansion of wind farms, which he fears may be harmful to health. In comments unlikely to build public confidence in the government's commitment to addressing global warming ahead of the Paris climate change summit in December, Mr Abbott said he shared concerns that wind farms were ugly, noisy and potentially harmful to health – despite an absence of scientific evidence of any danger.
Wind farm opponents have long claimed proximity to turbines can cause a range of health issues. Photo: Rohan Thomson
Urged on by conservative radio host Alan Jones, Mr Abbott agreed on Thursday that wind farms were unnecessary, revealing his preference was to have fewer of them. "This particular policy was a policy that was put in place in the late days of the Howard government," Mr Abbott said when asked why the government was subsidising wind farms but not other struggling rural businesses. "Knowing what we know now, I don't think we would have gone down this path in this way. At the time we thought it was the right way forward. Sometimes you have got to deal with the situation that you have got rather than the ideal, and what we have managed to do through this admittedly imperfect but better-than-the-alternative deal with the Senate is reduce the growth rate of this particular sector as much as the current Senate would allow us to do."
Tony Abbott. Photo: Gene Ramirez
And in a contradiction of multiple scientific analyses, including a 2015 review undertaken by the federal government's own National Health and Medical Research Council, Mr Abbott appeared to lend his prime ministerial authority to claims that the turbines cause illness. "Well Alan look, I do take your point about the potential health impact of these things," Mr Abbott said. The NH&MRC research had found no such thing but rather had called for more rigorous testing, noting that to date, there was no consistent evidence of negative health impacts from wind farms. Opponents of wind farms have long claimed a range of side-effects from proximity to turbines, which are said to generate audible noise as well as low-frequency "infrasound" waves not detectable to human ears but harmful nonetheless. "When I've been up close to these wind farms, there's no doubt, not only are they visually awful, they make a lot of noise," Mr Abbott said. "What we did recently in the Senate was reduce, Alan, reduce, capital R-E-D-U-C-E the number of these things that we are going to get in the future," he said. "Now I would frankly have liked to have reduced the number a lot more ... but we got the best deal we could," Mr Abbott added. He said the renewable energy target which, as currently agreed, mandates that 33,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity be produced from renewable sources including wind by 2020, was merely the lowest number the government could achieve within the current Parliament. The RET deal was struck between the government and the opposition in May after many months of uncertainty during which billions of dollars of investment was put on hold while the Abbott government-initiated Warburton Review examined its efficiency. It was an open secret in government and industry circles that the aim of that review was to expose the RET as the culprit in driving up household electricity prices, in order to dump it altogether. However, the government could not make the case and the Senate refused to comply. While Environment Minister Greg Hunt has worked effectively to build the government's green bona fides with voters, succeeding in a series of climate-related initiatives, Mr Abbott's comments will fuel longstanding suspicions that the Prime Minister is not personally convinced. A Senate Select Committee into wind turbines is under way but Labor's senator Anne Urquhart who is a member of that inquiry, said it had heard "no expert evidence" to support claims of health impacts. "There have been 25 reviews into the issue across the globe and not one has found evidence that wind farms are detrimental to human health," she said. "Health Canada came to the same conclusion after undertaking a large-scale epidemiological study of over 1200 households, which included 4000 hours of acoustic data, medical expertise, self-reporting and objective health measures including hair cortisol, blood pressure and heart rates."
Prime Minister Tony Abbott has admitted that the only wind farm he has got up close to is a single turbine on Rottnest Island that was partly funded by the Howard government.
Now, up close, they are ugly, they are noisy and they may have all sorts of other impacts which I will leave to the scientists to study
Mr Abbott was asked if he had ever visited a wind farm after he told broadcaster Alan Jones on Thursday turbines were "visually awful", noisy, and caused health problems.
The "offending" wind turbine on Rottnest Island. Photo: Shayne Hill Xtreme Visuals
The Prime Minister boasted the government's cut to the renewable energy target would limit the expansion of the industry. "I do take your point about the potential health impact of these things. When I've been up close to these windfarms, not only are they visually awful but they make a lot of noise," he told Jones. On Friday, Mr Abbott said he had formed this view after cycling around Rottnest Island, a popular tourist destination off Perth, a few years ago.
The wind turbine on Rottnest Island, off Western Australia.
He warned Australia would have seen an "explosion" of turbines had the government not clamped down on the industry. "Well, I was on Rottnest Island a few years ago and I cycled around the island most mornings and my path took me almost directly under the big wind turbine which has been on Rottnest Island for some time," Mr Abbott said. "Now, up close, they are ugly, they are noisy and they may have all sorts of other impacts which I will leave to the scientists to study."
Illustration: Ron Tandberg
The wind turbine on Rottnest Island was a $4 million project jointly funded by the Howard and West Australian governments and opened in 2004 to power the island's desalination plant. A spokeswoman for the Rottnest Island Authority said the turbine produced about 30 per cent of the island's power needs and had resulted in savings of around $350,000 each year. Asked how many people on the island had complained of health problems due to the turbine, the spokeswoman said: "None that we know of." Mr Abbott said state governments should increase the required distance between wind farms and housing.
The wind turbine on Rottnest Island. Photo: Rottnest Island Authority
"It's right and proper that we are having an inquiry into the health impacts of these things and, frankly, it's right and proper that we have reduced the renewable energy target because as things stood, there was going to be an explosion of these things right around our country," he said. In Victoria the state Labor government recently reduced planning restrictions on wind farms, meaning households must now be within a kilometre, instead of two, to veto a project. In Melbourne, Environment Minister Greg Hunt was pressed on whether he agreed with the Prime Minister that wind farms could cause health problems. In response, Mr Hunt pointed to an ongoing senate committee inquiry and another assessment by the National Health and Medical Research Council into wind farm noise and said he would not preempt their findings.
Asked whether Mr Abbott had himself preempted those inquires in his comments the day before, Mr Hunt said: "I don't think that is an accurate representation." In previous assessments the research council has found no reliable and consistent evidence connecting low frequency sound emitted from wind farms and human health problems. Mr Hunt was also asked what damage the Prime Minister's comments had had on the wind power industry to which he responded "none." When pushed on the Prime Minister's comments suggesting that cutting back the renewable energy target had been about stopping the roll-out of wind farms, Mr Hunt instead said the move had been about addressing problems of "phantom credits" in the scheme that emerged under the previous Labor government. In reference to Mr Abbott's comments that he found wind farms "visually awful", Mr Hunt added "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Opposition environment spokesman Mark Butler said it was hard to believe that Tony Abbott could find a less sophisticated argument against renewable energy than the one the Prime Minister offered on Thursday. "He must have had nightmares last night about that one wind turbine on Rottnest Island," Mr Butler said. "No other world leader would show such recklessness towards one of their own industries." Energy companies Infigen, ACCIONA, Trustpower and CWP Renewables told Fairfax Media Mr Abbott had not visited any of their wind farm projects but was welcome to. "CWP Renewables manages two wind farms in NSW – Boco Rock and Taralga – neither of which Tony Abbott has attended. This Sunday we are having a community open day at the Taralga Wind Farm which we would warmly welcome the Prime Minister to attend," CWP's head of development Ed Mounsey said.
Despite Rottnest Island's lone wind turbine offending Prime Minister Tony Abbott, the island authority has never received a complaint about either its noisiness or its looks, Western Australian Tourism Minister Kim Hames' office confirmed. About 200 people live on Rottnest Island, and another 550,000 visit each year. The nearest home to the turbine is a mere 395 metres away, the nearest road 175 metres away and still no complaints.
Tony Abbott thinks wind turbines are noisy and ugly.
Rottnest Island is an internationally recognised, sustainable, must-visit tourism destination," a Rottnest Island Authority spokeswoman said. "The Rottnest Island Authority respects the Prime Minister's opinion." The island used to rely utterly on liquid petroleum fuel, the authority's website says.
Quokka's are actually evil and plan to take over the world. I hear their plans over the gentle swish of my blades pic.twitter.com/kHZ2mqLRsK
The turbine came about following a RIA report in 2001 that said groundwater was becoming depleted and salty after years of poor rainfall. This gave rise to the Integrated Water and Power Development Plan to source most drinking water through desalination, which needed a new power system to be viable. So the 600 kW turbine was installed in 2004, more than half-way funded with a $2.1 million grant from the former Howard government, with the remaining $1.75 million coming from the state government, Minister Hames' office said. The turbine now provides 35 per cent of the island's power needs, complementing low-load and standard diesel generators. It saves about $350,000 worth of fossil fuel per year – more than $3.5 million across its lifetime so far – and reduces greenhouse gases by about 1100 tons per year. As intended, it also fully powers the desalination plant that provides 80 per cent of the 112kL of drinking water the island requires each year, with the rest being made up by rainwater. This means the island is entirely self-sufficient and makes no demands on the state's Water Corporation. Visitors are reminded of island's sustainability focus with a sign at the Visitor Centre when they check in.
Engineers develop state-by-state plan to convert US to 100% clean, renewable energy by 2050
Jun 09, 2015 by Bjorn Carey
Stanford Professor Mark Z. Jacobson and other researchers have calculated how to meet each state's new power demands using only the renewable energies – wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, and tiny amounts of tidal and wave – available to …more One potential way to combat ongoing climate change, eliminate air pollution mortality, create jobs and stabilize energy prices involves converting the world's entire energy infrastructure to run on clean, renewable energy.
This is a daunting challenge. But now, in a new study, Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, and colleagues, including U.C. Berkeley researcher Mark Delucchi, are the first to outline how each of the 50 states can achieve such a transition by 2050. The 50 individual state plans call for aggressive changes to both infrastructure and the ways we currently consume energy, but indicate that the conversion is technically and economically possible through the wide-scale implementation of existing technologies. "The main barriers are social, political and getting industries to change. One way to overcome the barriers is to inform people about what is possible," said Jacobson, who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and at the Precourt Institute for Energy. "By showing that it's technologically and economically possible, this study could reduce the barriers to a large scale transformation." The study is published in the online edition of Energy and Environmental Sciences. An interactive map summarizing the plans for each state is available at www.thesolutionsproject.org . Jacobson and his colleagues started by taking a close look at the current energy demands of each state, and how those demands would change under business-as-usual conditions by the year 2050. To create a full picture of energy use in each state, they examined energy usage in four sectors: residential, commercial, industrial and transportation. For each sector, they then analyzed the current amount and source of the fuel consumed – coal, oil, gas, nuclear, renewables – and calculated the fuel demands if all fuel usage were replaced with electricity. This is a significantly challenging step – it assumes that all the cars on the road become electric, and that homes and industry convert to fully electrified heating and cooling systems. But Jacobson said that their calculations were based on integrating existing technology, and the energy savings would be significant. "When we did this across all 50 states, we saw a 39 percent reduction in total end-use power demand by the year 2050," Jacobson said. "About 6 percentage points of that is gained through efficiency improvements to infrastructure, but the bulk is the result of replacing current sources and uses of combustion energy with electricity." The next step involved figuring out how to power the new electric grid. The researchers focused on meeting each state's new power demands using only the renewable energies – wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, and tiny amounts of tidal and wave – available to each state. They analyzed each state's sun exposure, and how many south-facing, non-shaded rooftops could accommodate solar panels. They developed and consulted wind maps and determined whether local offshore wind turbines were an option. Geothermal energy was available at a reasonable cost for only 13 states. The plan calls for virtually no new hydroelectric dams, but does account for energy gains from improving the efficiency of existing dams. The report lays out individual roadmaps for each state to achieve an 80 percent transition by 2030, and a full conversion by 2050. Jacobson said that several states are already on their way. Washington state, for instance, could make the switch to full renewables relatively quickly, thanks to the fact that more than 70 percent of its current electricity comes from existing hydroelectric sources. That translates to about 35 percent of the state's all-purpose power if Washington were 100-percent electrified; wind and solar could fill most of the remainder. Iowa and South Dakota are also well-positioned, as they already generate nearly 30 percent of their electricity from wind power. California, which was the focus of Jacobson's second single-state roadmap to renewables after New York, has already adopted some of his group's suggestions and has a plan to be 60 percent electrified by renewables by 2030. The plan calls for no more than 0.5 percent of any state's land to be covered in solar panels or wind turbines. The upfront cost of the changes would be significant, but wind and sunlight are free. So the overall cost spread over time would be roughly equal to the price of the fossil fuel infrastructure, maintenance and production. "When you account for the health and climate costs – as well as the rising price of fossil fuels – wind, water and solar are half the cost of conventional systems," Jacobson said. "A conversion of this scale would also create jobs, stabilize fuel prices, reduce pollution-related health problems and eliminate emissions from the United States. There is very little downside to a conversion, at least based on this science." Jacobson said that if the conversion is followed exactly as his plan outlines, the reduction of air pollution in the U.S. could prevent the deaths of approximately 63,000 Americans who die from air pollution-related causes each year. It would also eliminate U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases produced from fossil fuel, which would otherwise cost the world $3.3 trillion a year by 2050.
I have one of the Lenovo G570 Laptops. And this is really BAD. The first one is that the management of Lenovo have done a deal with Microsoft to install an Operating System on the hard drive, and they claim that allocating a "special area" of the hard drive for recovery purposes, is a solution in case of "some kind of OS / Hard Drive problem - but they do not give you a copy of the OS on a DVD, to reinstall it, in case the OS crashed or a new HDD was needed etc.... This means that IF your operating system corrupts, your going to be facing a HUGE and BAD uphill battle to get a copy of YOUR operating system from Lenovo. No doing on the spot brain surgery on your own lap top by reinstalling the OS... No. This comes down to you not getting a 20c DVD with your operating system on it, Vs. hours fighting with idiots on the phone and days and or weeks waiting around for the DVD to arrive - if ever. With the amount of down time a non working laptop can cost you in losses, you may...
The "DAS KEYBOARD" (or The "The Keyboard") is an interesting piece of both "allegedly" good quality switches, piss poor design, misleading advertising (outright bullshit) and useless customer support. The pro-model. The ultimate model. They do use the apparently remarkable "Cherry" (brand) key switches, who's main claim to fame is that although gold plating can be made remarkably thin and the contact area is remarkably small, the switch contacts are gold plated - which makes them corrosion and arc resistant, and they are rated to 50 million cycles - or so they claim - you know, "press any key" + "unpress" = one cycle. This is their main claim to fame - the longevity of the key switches. "Yes the Das Keyboard (by implication) will last as long as the switches it is composed of - that's 50 million presses of each of the key switches..." But is that the actual contacts are claimed to be rated for 50M cycles? Or ...
This actually does look like her.. Awesome. Rat Face and I - our paths used to cross from time to time and the friendly greeting in passing, perhaps to be followed up with some small talk - was fairly frequently met with hostile silence... Like she doesn't have a butt plug up her arse, she has a cactus.... LOL Not my problem - have a great day. But of late, as I have changed courses in life, I have been dealing with WOMEN and men, who are into dealing with their family of origin issues - and some of them are pretty sane and grounded. Which makes her in comparison, look like an angry, nasty, dysfunctional cunt. Starting with the family of origin issues.... It's bad. And then examining the cultural norms of her peer group and environment - merely an extension of her families craziness. It's worse - in that there is way more of it, and everyone reinforces the lowest common denominator - the system of family and social dysfunction. Everyone reinforces everyone else, in staying...
Wind farm opponents have long claimed proximity to turbines can cause a range of health issues. Photo: Rohan Thomson 
Tony Abbott. Photo: Gene Ramirez 
The "offending" wind turbine on Rottnest Island. Photo: Shayne Hill Xtreme Visuals 
The wind turbine on Rottnest Island, off Western Australia.
Illustration: Ron Tandberg
The wind turbine on Rottnest Island. Photo: Rottnest Island Authority 
Tony Abbott thinks wind turbines are noisy and ugly.
Explore further: Study shows how to power California with wind, water and sun More information: "100% clean and renewable wind, water, and sunlight (WWS) all-sector energy roadmaps for the 50 United States": web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/USStatesWWS.pdf
Comments
Post a Comment