RUSH: Morgantown, West Virginia, Dave, thank you for calling. You’re first today.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Glad to talk to you. I’d like to address the issue about Rock Port, Missouri, presumably getting a hundred percent of its electricity from four wind turbines.
RUSH: By the way, I got a story from somebody out of there yesterday saying the Drive-By report on that was wrong; there are more than four.
CALLER: Doesn’t matter if there are four turbines or 4,000 turbines. It’s complete baloney.
RUSH: Tell me about it.
CALLER: It’s not physically possible. Well, in the first place you’d have to have strong winds at all times, 24/7, 365. This occurs almost no place on earth. Maybe at the top of Mt. Everest, perhaps. At best, 30% of the time anywhere in the civilized world. So without that you’d have to have another source of electricity during the other 70% of the time which comes from conventional sources both gas, nuclear.
RUSH: Right, something to power is the turbines.
CALLER: Well, the turbines are powered by wind, but when the wind is isn’t blowing, they don’t produce any electricity — and although most people don’t know it, don’t realize it, there’s no storage on the grid. There’s no possible way to store that kind of electricity. There are no batteries large enough. So this is the fatal flaw of wind energy. It requires fossil fuel backup of at least 90% of the installed capacity of whatever the windmills are.
RUSH: (laughter)
CALLER: You can’t predict when the wind blows.
RUSH: Ninety percent?
CALLER: At least. And just checked the EON Report in Great Britain, and it will confirm that.
RUSH: I believe you. You have a trustworthy and very confident voice.
CALLER: Well, I am confident because I read, and I know what’s going on in Europe with respect to wind energy, and it’s not a pretty picture. It’s even more complicated than that because we can’t predict when and how hard the wind will blow, and it causes havoc on a grid, because you can’t ramp these sources up. These conventional sources, coal, nuke, and gas —
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: — take a long time to ramp up and down, so basically they have to be running all the time to cover the intermittency of wind, and the bottom line is wind turbines produce no net CO2 reduction, even though that’s basically the only reason they exist.
RUSH: Well, theoretically it’s the only reason they exist.
CALLER: Well, the reason they exist is tax credits, and the reason that governments make the tax credits available (which, by the way, are incredibly high), is because of the political pressure that the wind industry has placed upon greens and politicians and most people think they’re — I read something just recently said 80% of all people think wind turbines — are wonderful. In other words, that they produce electricity and —
RUSH: I know.
CALLER: — they’re an answer to our energy needs.
RUSH: It’s very, very sad how many people have bought into this whole notion that alternatives are somehow pristine, clean and pure as the wind-driven snow, almost godlike; versus the systems that we use now, which are totally destructive. You know, you could draw a similar analogy. Let’s say that the hybrid industry, hybrid automobile industry and all the related advocates succeeded in getting just half — let’s say half the people in LA — driving them.
CALLER: Mmm-hmm?
RUSH: Well, they all have to plug in somewhere to recharge the batteries.
CALLER: Well, that will cause a blackout or brownout immediately if that were the case.
RUSH: Yeah, but where does that power come from? That’s the point.
CALLER: Well, we don’t have much excess capacity. Right now there is still a little bit of excess capacity in this country, but it’s declining rapidly and wind power and all the other alternative energy isn’t really replacing it because it all requires backup. The same is true of solar, although solar is such a minor factor that doesn’t even enter into it. But basically we will find out in a few years after we struggle through this process and after we watch what has been going on in Europe that wind power is the next ethanol. In other words, it doesn’t really work. It was a nice try. We wasted billions on it. There’s already been —
RUSH: And —
CALLER: — $3 billion worth of —
RUSH: — we’ve certainly —
CALLER: — federal money spent on it.
RUSH: — polluted our countrysides’ appearance with all these turbines.
CALLER: Sure. And the difference between wind energy and ethanol is you can always abandon the cornfields and replant soybean or use the corn for feed but once the windmills are up, they’ll never come down. It will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to remove them. They won’t be removed. They will scar the countryside for decades to come, and they will be useless.
RUSH: Well, it’s going to be interesting when this comes to pass. We could perhaps use ’em as cell phone towers.
CALLER: Yeah. Maybe we could make thrill rides out of them. You could have, you know, a drop from them and charge admission or something like that.
RUSH: (laughing)
CALLER: Some of them are approaching 500 feet tall.
RUSH: Right. They’ll find something, make billboards out of them or sell advertising on them or something. But the bottom line is when the scenario that you describe happens — when down the road we find out that this whole thing has been bogus — the people that were responsible for it will never, ever get blamed. We will only be able to talk about their good intentions. We will never be able to talk about the failed results. ‘At least they were trying to do something. While the rest of you were all naysaying it, at least they were trying!’ This is how leftists pretty much excuse every failure (and there are too many to mention here) that they author and engineer.