Wind has been used for millennia as an energy source to propel sailing boats, and to mill grain and pump water via windmills. Neolithic humans are thought to have used primitive sails to help move their watercraft, the ancient Egyptians had sailing boats in 3400 BC, and across the 5400 years since, most civilisations, including the Romans, Greeks, Phoenicians, and Vikings, saw major developments in the use of sail, with the largest happening in the 16th century. David Newton’s 2015 book Wind energy provides a useful review of developments in wind power, from sails through to today’s modern windfarms.1

The Persians appear to have been the first civilisation to develop windmills, using them to crush grain from 500 to 900 AD, with the English using them for the same purpose from 1100. There was a windmill in Arles, France, in 1105.2 Today, windmills are emblematic of the Dutch, who used them to pump water from lowland areas from the 1300s. Dutch colonisers in New Amsterdam (now New York) erected windmills in the 1600s and by the 1800s their use had followed settlers and the railway as they moved westward. The world’s first electricity-generating windmill was erected by Scottish engineer James Blyth in his garden at Marykirk, Kincardineshire in 1887; he used it to help power his house (see Figure 1.1). In 1895, he licensed the Glasgow engineering firm Mavor and Coulson to construct a larger improved version of his prototype.3 In 1910, the Daily Mail newspaper in England explained the basics of wind-powered electricity generation to its readers:

In 1888, Charles Brush built the first electricity-generating windmill in the USA in Cleveland, Ohio, with an output of just 12 kilowatts (kW).4 It was abandoned in 1908. By the 1920s many farms across the great plains of the USA not connected to the electricity grid were being partly powered by electricity generated by windmills, built in a factory in Minneapolis that produced some 30,000 over the next 30 years. These wind turbines were very small by today’s standards, and it was not until 1941 that the world’s first megawatt-sized turbine (1.25 MW) was connected to the local electricity grid and began operating in Castleton, Vermont. It operated for 1100 hours before suffering a mechanical failure caused by a wartime shortage of reinforcement material. Interest in wind energy went into the doldrums until the 1960s because of the widespread availability of cheap fossil fuels. In 1980 in the USA, electricity generated by coal- or oil-fired power stations cost around 5 cents per kilowatt hour, while that from wind was about 55 cents.5 Wind energy, at the time, could not compete economically with fossil fuels, and there was only marginal awareness of the environmental consequences of burning fossil fuels. It was only in the 1980s that concern about climate change began to take root, although the problem had been identified much earlier. Figure 1.2 shows an interesting example of very early reporting about these problems.

As awareness of the possibility of ‘peak oil’ emerged in the 1950s interest in renewable energy rekindled.6 This was boosted significantly following the 1973 Arab oil embargo, and by President Richard Nixon’s Project Independence (announced in 1973), which was designed to make the USA less reliant on imported energy. However, renewable energy was given only some emphasis in a summary of the project, and wind energy was never mentioned. The large rise in oil prices from 1973 saw major attention focused on renewable energy, with the US government forming the United States Department of Energy in 1977 and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (formerly the Solar Energy Research Institute) established in Boulder, Colorado. The US government began providing renewable energy tax credits in the 1980s to encourage investment in wind energy development.

In the mid 1970s Canada’s Quebec Hydro constructed a number of 40 kW vertical-axis turbines, which became known as ‘egg beaters’. The world’s first windfarm (with 20 turbines) was constructed in New Hampshire, USA in 1980 and the first offshore farm commenced operation off the Danish coast in 1991. Canada’s first windfarm began generating power at Crowley Ridge, Alberta in 1994.7

Denmark takes the lead

Danish polymath Poul La Cour – sometimes referred to as Denmark’s Nikolai Tesla – contributed greatly to the development of wind technology. Well ahead of his time, in 1895 La Cour built a wind turbine system that separated hydrogen and oxygen from water and provided lighting for the Askov Folk High School. As happened elsewhere, the technology was sidelined for much of the 20th century.

As a small but windy nation with no petrochemical wealth, Denmark was hit particularly hard by the 1970s oil crisis. Proposals to address Denmark’s energy dependency with nuclear energy were met with massive resistance and calls to harness renewable energy.

While energy experts at the time were debating whether large scale wind energy would ever be practical, an alternative school in Ullborg built a 1 MW turbine in 1975. Standing 50 metres high, the Tvindkraft turbine still operates today and is revered as an important industrial artefact.

The Global Wind Energy Council provides the most comprehensive overview of the global wind industry today. In 2015, the GWEC estimated there were some 314,000 turbines generating electricity in 80 nations.8 In 2016, there were 486.79 GB of installed wind power throughout the world. This represented a 17 percent increase on the 2015 total and approximately a 20.4-fold increase in 16 years. Over 40 percent (42.8 percent) of global capacity added between 2015 and 2016 occurred in China.9

In 2016, China, with 169 GW of installed wind energy capacity, had more than double that of the USA, in second place with 82 GW. Australia ranked 17th, with 4.327 GW of installed capacity from wind power (see Table i.1). Denmark, with a land mass of 43,094 square kilometres smaller than Tasmania and a 2017 population of 5.7 million (less than a quarter of Australia’s 24.6 million) had 5.2 GW of installed wind power capacity, 17 percent more than Australia.

Windfarms in Australia

It’s quite likely that the first attempt to generate electricity from wind in Australia was with a Burne wind turbine (Figure 1.3) installed at Westerfield, the Mornington Peninsula farm of Russell and Mabel Grimwade, in the 1920s. The turbine was only sporadically useful.

Lloyd Dunn (1912–1978) founded the Dunlite Electrical Company in Adelaide in 1935 and manufactured a range of wind generators from 300 W to 5 kW, until 1975 (figure 1.4).10 Many were manufactured, and the power generated was fed into lead acid batteries and used for homesteads, farm workshops, lighthouses and remote telecommunications repeater stations; the Dunlite company also had a thriving business exporting wind generators to North America. In the middle of the 20th century, seemingly almost every farm across Australia had either Southern Cross or Comet windmills (see Figure 1.5) drawing up bore water, helping immeasurably to develop the Australian rural landscape. The repetitive clanking sounds made by these windmills were part of the Australian rural soundscape for decades. Not too long ago, rural communities saw wind and the machinery to harvest it as essential to their livelihoods.

Australia’s first modern, grid-connected wind turbines began operation in 1987 at Salmon Beach near Esperance in Western Australia. Six 60 kW turbines ran for 15 years, until they were decommissioned and dismantled in 2002, by which time the turbines were considered inefficient relative to newer, larger turbines. New turbines (now totalling nine) began operating from 1993, with a further six 600 kW turbines added at Nine Mile Beach in 2003.

Today, there are 80 operating windfarms across Australia. The smallest ‘farm’ is the single 60 kW Westwind turbine operating at Breamlea, near Geelong in Victoria,11 which was erected shortly after the Salmon Beach turbines and celebrates its 30th birthday in 2017. At the time of writing, the largest windfarm in Australia is the 140-turbine Macarthur windfarm, located in south-western Victoria. Macarthur commenced operation in April 2013 and has a capacity of 420 MW. This will soon be eclipsed by the 530 MW windfarm at Stockyard Hill, 35 kilometres west of Ballarat. This is a project that the founder of the anti-windfarm Waubra Foundation, Peter Mitchell (see Chapter 6), tried unsuccessfully to have stopped several years ago. Some 35 projects are under construction or due to be completed in 2017 (Figure 1.6). These projects will deliver an unprecedented $7.4 billion in investment, produce more than 3300 MW of new renewable energy capacity, and create more than 4100 direct jobs.12

The total electricity-generating capacity of the Australian wind energy sector today stands at 4.3 GW.13 Wind energy has made the greatest proportional contribution to local energy supplies in South Australia, with around 40 percent of the state’s energy coming from wind in 2016,14 although Victoria and New South Wales are fast catching up. The amount of wind energy produced in Australia is expected to double before 2021. Any data we might cite in this book will already be out of date when it is published, so fast is the pace of new windfarm developments.

Early objections in Australia

Complaints about windfarms in Australia appear to date from the early 2000s, when press reports mentioned occasional negative reactions in rural communities to the perceived intrusiveness of turbines in bucolic landscapes (one 2002 report described them as ‘white behemoths’,15 and the Victorian premier Ted Baillieu spoke of ‘towering triffids’16), allegations that threatened bird species were in danger of being struck by turbine blades, the divisiveness engendered in communities by the perceived unfairness of some landowners being paid hosting fees of up to $21,000 per year per turbine while neighbours received none (see Chapter 3), and debates about the economics of green energy. Unapologetic NIMBYism (‘I’m quite happy to admit that this is a not-in-my-backyard thing, because my backyard is very special’) was also evident as far back as 2002.17 Groups opposing windfarms ostensibly in order to preserve pristine bush and rural environments were active from these early years and included various branches of the Australian Landscape Guardians (see Chapter 6). Interest groups with overt climate change denial agendas also actively opposed windfarm developments, particularly in Victoria. Chief among these was the Australian Environment Foundation,18 registered in February 2005 out of the office of the Institute of Public Affairs and run for many years by Max Rheese, who later went on to advise Senator David Leyonhjelm, also a strong critic of windfarms.19

Six non-health arguments against windfarms

This book is about noise and health objections to windfarms. However, besides health arguments (see Chapters 3 and 4), those opposed to windfarms argue in six main, often intertwined domains: economic viablity; landscape aesthetics; devaluation of surrounding property; danger to birds and bats; danger to aircraft; and fire hazards. We will summarise and critically comment on each of these shortly.

Opponents also have a reserve arsenal of minor arguments which are often thrown in for good measure. Simon Holmes à Court, who chaired the Hepburn Community Wind Project in Victoria, provided a list of 22 objections used by the Daylesford and Districts Landscape Guardians (in addition to noise, health, blade flicker and visual amenity) in their unsuccessful appeal against Hepburn Wind’s planning application (Table 1.1)

‘Wind energy is unreliable and uneconomical’

The first major argument advanced by those opposed to windfarms is that electricity generated from wind is unreliable and uneconomical to produce because wind is intermittent and other forms of generation (especially coal, gas-fired and nuclear) are said to be far cheaper and more reliable. They argue that windfarms can only be erected and operate because they are vastly subsidised by governments duped by a global conspiracy of lies generated by climate change advocates and scientists, most of whom promote their arguments simply to keep their snouts comfortably in the trough of government-funded research grants.

China is far and away the world leader in both economic growth and the installation of new wind energy capacity – 23.4 GW added in 2016 alone (nearly 5.5 times in one year what Australia has installed in total). Try to imagine a conversation between China’s energy minister and the then Abbott government’s Business Advisory Council czars, Maurice Newman20 and Dick Warburton, both of whom loathed wind energy.21 These two would explain to the Chinese leaders that their economic understanding of wind energy, and their commitment to trying to greatly increase China’s use of clean, renewable energy, were simply all wrong. While Newman and Warburton were publicly running down wind, in late 2015 global wind energy capacity (432 GW) surpassed that from nuclear generation (383 GW) for the first time.22 By 2021 global wind energy is expected to almost double to 800 GW,23 while the global nuclear power industry is in a state of torpor. In January 2017, Bloomberg reported that global investment in wind energy was $110.3 billion in 2016, down 11 percent compared with the previous year.24 This was largely due to an 18 percent reduction by China. As Bloomberg noted, ‘Because the vast majority of clean energy investment goes into financing assets in the world’s most carbon-polluting nation, when China’s market dips it moves the needle on global numbers.’ The article continued:

Then there’s that other economic powerhouse, Germany, which led new wind energy capacity growth in Europe in 2016 with another 5.4 GW in newly installed capacity.25 How is it that Newman’s and Warburton’s sources of information on wind energy being uneconomic seem to have passed by China’s and Germany’s most senior energy policy planners? And then there’s multi-billionaire Warren Buffett, who in 2013 pumped US$1.9 billion into wind development in Iowa and by 2016, even more enthusiastic, was planning to construct the USA’s largest windfarm of 2000 MW with a $3.6 billion investment.26 Another windfarm critic, former Australian treasurer Joe Hockey, should have got on the phone and let Buffett know which side of the energy bread was really buttered. Farmers have always harvested the sun and the rain to feed humanity, and for a long time they relied upon the wind to pump water and mill grain. Farmers are now harvesting the wind as just another farm activity, with the welcome side effect of jamming an exponentially increasing brake on pollution and greenhouse gas production. Anyone with solar panels on their roof knows how they silently smash your power bill. Anyone who has grown their own fruit and vegetables ‘gets’ the natural wisdom of putting nature to work. It’s not hard for ordinary people to understand that wind, as a free energy source available to any investor installing turbines, ought to be harvested wherever it can be.

So from what possible set of bizarre values could someone look at the application of the minds of some the world’s best energy engineers to vastly improving the efficiency of modern wind turbines and call their work not just a bad idea, but ‘utterly offensive’, as Joe Hockey did in 2014? Community studies consistently show wide support for renewable energy, so Hockey’s comment would have struck the great majority of the population as plain weird.

Would Hockey have preferred to drive past a vast, filthy, open-cut coal mine on his way to Parliament House in Canberra? We suspect not. On any long drive in Australia one sees quarries, highways, tall silos, towns, tunnels, bridges, massive power lines and their towers, radio towers, airports, rail lines, land clearance for cropping, and urban development. Over the decades, bucolic sentimentalists have used language like Joe Hockey’s to oppose all of these developments. Thankfully, few of them were in positions of power to ban them.

I tweeted the photo in Figure 1.7 on 30 May 2014 with the caption ‘Ghastly photo showing how wind farms ruin landscapes’. It has so far received 2753 retweets and been favourited 1382 times. As of 22 September 2017 it had had 135,420 Twitter impressions and 10,572 engagements. My second-most retweeted tweet has received a distant 1598 retweets.

‘Wind power is only viable if subsidised by the taxpayer’

Governments have long encouraged or discouraged the production and markets for various commodities by a range of taxes, subsidies and taxation policies. An example of this is tobacco tax, with Australian governments having set tobacco tax increases explicitly to reduce demand (which it does more than any other measure).27 We pay less for low-alcohol beer than for brands with higher levels because low-strength beers are taxed at a lower rate. Various arrangements have long applied to fuels, and since 2000 the production of renewable energy in Australia has been effectively encouraged by arrangements set in place by the government’s Renewable Energy Target (RET). Australia’s Renewable Energy (Electricity) Act 2000 provides a financial incentive to encourage the supply of electricity from renewable sources to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector. It operates for both large-scale and small-scale renewable projects. The Large-scale Renewable Energy Target Scheme requires Australia to generate progressively more renewable energy each year, towards a 2020 target of 33 terawatt hours (i.e. 33 million megawatt hours) above a 1997 baseline. This is enough energy to fully supply power to some five million houses. Wholesale purchasers of electricity (which then retail it to consumers) are obligated under the act to obtain and annually ‘surrender’ proportionately towards the generation of additional renewable electricity. They do this by purchasing large-scale generation certificates (LGCs). These are recorded in the online Renewable Energy Certificate (REC) Registry, having been registered there by renewable energy power stations like wind and solar energy farms and hydroelectricity power stations. One LGC is equivalent to one megawatt hour of eligible renewable electricity generated above the power station’s baseline.

LGCs can be traded via electronic transfer between REC Registry account holders. Supply and demand determines the price of LGCs, with certificate prices not regulated by the Clean Energy Regulator. However, there is a price cap: if retailers don’t surrender, they are fined $65 per LGC they fall short. For tax reasons – fines are not deductible expenses – it is expected that most retailers will pay up to a maximum $93 per LGC before choosing to take the penalty. While prices have come close to this, especially after the Abbott government’s own-goal from restricting supply, the long-term average has been below half this price.

This complex alphabet soup of arrangements is explained in detail by the Clean Energy Regulator28 but for our purposes here, the Australian government policy of providing what are in effect incentive subsidies for the development of renewable energy has always caused a bizarre apoplexy among opponents of renewable energy. They argue that without such subsidies and concessions, renewable energy could not compete with fossil fuels. Windfarm opponents are unrelenting in their attacks on the financial support the wind industry receives from governments, but always silent on the massively greater supports received by the fossil fuel and mining industries. In the weeks before the 2016 Australian federal election a coalition of groups called on the government to cut the $7.7 billion in subsidies that were then being provided to fossil fuel industries. This sum included ‘$5.5 billion of non-agricultural fuel tax credits, $1.24 billion for concessional rates of fuel excise on aviation fuel and $650 million of tax deductions for exploration and prospecting by the mining industry’, part of which would have gone to support coal, coal-seam gas and oil exploration.29 The total subsidy received by the Australian wind sector to date has been calculated at approximately $2.7 billion in total over 16 years.30

Every coal-fired power station in Australia (and the pylons and wires to connect them to the population centres) was made possible by a government providing financing arrangements that modern developers can only dream of: government debt rates and guaranteed power purchase for the asset’s entire life.

By contrast, nearly all wind and solar energy projects in the country have been built with private money. The RET has provided an essential subsidy to the renewable sector, but this is orders of magnitude smaller than the government support paid to the fossil fuel sector. It is important to note that the RET is effectively a self-destructing subsidy. Over time, as costs of energy from non-renewable generators rise (which they are) and renewable costs fall (as they are), the LGC price falls. The current RET ends in 2030, however generators in Latrobe Valley will still be paying little more than the current 25.2 cents per gigajoule for their coal in real terms – i.e. they are paying around three dollars to the state in real terms for the coal they burn to generate one megawatt hour, a unit they frequently sell for 20 to 30 times more, and, until policy settings change, paying nothing for the tens of millions of tons of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxides and heavy metals that each emits annually.

Transmission lines to fossil fuel power stations have all been built at government expense, as have transmission lines such as the 230 kilometres of lines from Port Augusta to the Olympic Dam copper, uranium and gold mine in South Australia. High voltage power lines cost around one million dollars per kilometre. No transmission lines have been built in Australia specifically for windfarms at taxpayer expense. The needed transmission lines from the windfarms to connect to the grid are built at the expense of the windfarm developers.

‘Wind is intermittent, so wind power can never be a serious source of power’

Just as the sun does not shine at night, so does the wind not blow constantly. From this, critics of wind and solar energy argue that these renewable sources could never replace fuel sources that can generate power continually, like coal, gas, nuclear or hydro.

There are several obvious things wrong with this argument. First, it is true that in any nation the sun does not shine nor does the wind blow all the time. However, in a large nation like Australia where several states (Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia) are connected with one another via the same electricity grid, the wind may not be blowing in some areas but blowing strongly in others. For example, if the wind is blowing hard in South Australia, the wind energy generated there can be exported into other eastern states if it is surplus to local consumption.

The aggregate wind energy in the electricity network is much less variable than that of a single turbine. While it is true that there are many times in a year when the aggregate energy output of all windfarms is relatively small, the grid is built to deal with this. Even the largest coal-fired power stations can and do go offline without warning, often during extreme events, as occurred when violent storms hit South Australia on 28 September 2016. Likewise, transmission lines can fail. Australian network operators always strive to have reserve power equal to the capacity of the largest generating unit in the system. At any time, a fleet of generators is ready to ramp up to replace a sudden loss of generation far larger than any windfarm in the country can generate. In reality, wind energy is very predictable – the Australian Wind Energy Forecasting System (AWEFS) is highly successful, providing accurate forecasts and ample time for the network operator and the market to adjust to variability. If there were to be a freak event that resulted in zero wind across the entire grid, there is surplus capacity across other operators. Every generator in the network effectively backs up every other generator. While it is undisputed that managing the grid becomes more complex as more and more variable generation is added to the network, the network operator AEMO has repeatedly confirmed that there is no reason to believe the challenge won’t be met.

Those who initially advanced the argument that wind energy is unreliable made it in the era when developments in energy storage were in their infancy. This of course is rapidly changing. The dramatic advances in battery storage (and fast-decreasing costs) that we have seen in recent years, largely driven by the transport sector, are for the first time enabling business models for large-scale grid-connected battery farms. The high-profile offer to the South Australian government by Tesla’s Elon Musk in May 2017 to install a 100 MW battery facility within 100 days and to forfeit all payment if the facility was not operating by that time perfectly illustrates how far battery storage has come.31

New-found enthusiasm for pumped hydro energy storage (PHES), whereby water is pumped uphill when energy is cheap (generally at night) and flows downhill through turbines at times of peak demand, has the potential to create a low-tech but powerful ‘water battery’. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said after the 2017 federal budget that the Commonwealth may consider buying out the New South Wales and Victorian governments’ stakes in the Snowy Hydro Scheme, at a cost of $5.25 billion on top of a planned $2 billon upgrade.32 Batteries and PHES will both give gas-powered generators a run for their money over the coming decades, especially as society moves, as it inevitably must, towards pricing emitters of carbon pollution.

‘Wind turbines are ugly and ruin landscapes’: aesthetic objections

Opponents often claim that wind turbines (or ‘industrial wind turbines’ – IWTs, as they like to call them), are ugly: that the towers are ghastly ‘industrial’ monstrosities imposed on pristine rural landscapes by large, often foreign-owned corporations, abetted by politicians and faceless bureaucrats who live far away from these eyesores in cities. They utterly devastate the bucolic aesthetic of the landscapes where they are constructed, the argument runs. Case studies from Ireland and Scotland support the idea ‘that aesthetic perceptions, both positive and negative, are the strongest single influence on individuals’ attitudes towards wind power projects.’33

People are at perfect liberty to dislike the look of wind turbines and to feel that they should be located somewhere other than rural settings. All local governments have zoning regulations so that industries such as heavy manufacturing, or those thought likely to attract excessive traffic or undesirable patrons (as with brothel zoning regulations), are prevented from operating in inappropriate areas. But every person making this NIMBY (‘not in my backyard’) or BANANA (‘build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone’) criticism about windfarms lives in the modern world, where homes and workplaces are powered by electricity. Every commodity they consume has been grown or manufactured and distributed using generated power. These objectors are happy to benefit from this power generation but want to live well away from it. Living near power generation is something that unnamed ‘others’ should have to put up with. Here, there is always the unvoiced assumption that power should be generated anywhere other than where the objector happens to live.

The assumption is that those who have chosen to live in a rural location, unlike those living in cities, have a permanent entitlement to be spared from all urban-industrial construction. Such constructions should be located well away from human habitation (the Waubra Foundation’s Sarah Laurie says wind turbines should be at least 10 kilometres from any house), or in or near urban areas. Rural areas, the argument runs, should never be considered for developments like windfarms. People who were born in, or who choose to move to, these areas apparently have an inalienable right to be free of any ‘unnatural’ development. But rural Australia has long been a highly modified landscape, looking very little like it did prior to European settlement. The roads, powerlines, sheds, irrigation infrastructure, fences, dams, introduced trees and monoculture crops are not ‘natural’ developments.

 Anti-windfarm groups regularly have apoplexy about even a single decommissioned wind turbine that is not immediately dismantled and removed. Yet a 2017 report from the Australian Institute estimated that there were approximately 60,000 abandoned mines in Australia, some dating as far back as the 19th-century gold rushes, and that very few had ever been rehabilitated or cleaned up.34

Sydney radio announcer Alan Jones took this argument to its rhetorical nadir in November 2016:

Where should one begin with this nonsense? Yes, Jones’ named sites are heavily populated, but they are also exceptionally expensive and iconic sites, where all passing traffic and public amenity would be obstructed by turbine construction. In his rhetorical fervour, Jones also appears to have overlooked that the existing noise levels in these places would far exceed that of a wind turbine, and the noise being emitted by the breaking waves on Bondi Beach would similarly put that from a wind turbine well into its wake. Meanwhile, although all these sites would have some wind, it would not compare to that available in the sites carefully chosen after wind measurements have been taken. Property owners interested in hosting a windfarm invite wind companies to make these assessments, and many applications do not proceed because of sub-optimal wind conditions. Just as it would make no sense to grow wheat in a central business district or to drill for oil on Bondi Beach, we don’t put wind turbines in the middle of built-up areas where the resource is poor. (There are plenty of European cities that do have decent wind and so have turbines in peri-urban and, in some cases, urban areas.)

Jones’ puerile argument shows the quality of debate so often displayed by the opponents of windfarms.

​‘The energy cost of manufacturing a wind turbine is never recouped in its operational life’

Some windfarm opponents display an obsession with the steel and concrete that make up the turbines’ towers and the concrete that keeps them firmly upright, helpfully pointing out that turbines require mining, smelting and (mostly) coal-fired heat in their manufacture. By this argument, wind turbines therefore owe their very existence to fossil fuels and mining and so until such time when all energy is derived from renewable sources, windfarms can never ‘replace’ fossil fuels. One opponent, Roger Sexton, claimed that it would take a windfarm 3580 years to ‘pay back’ the carbon dioxide embodied just in the concrete foundations of the turbines, a timeframe David Clarke estimates is about 6000 times longer than the real value.36

Simon Holmes à Court told us that each of the turbines used by the Hepburn Community Wind Project (both REpower MM82 turbines on 69-metre towers) required 244 cubic metres of concrete for their foundations. A local concrete supply company advised Hepburn that the average house in the area required 40 cubic metres of concrete – i.e. while a local turbine required concrete equivalent to that used to make about six local houses, each turbine is capable of providing annually as much energy as 1000 homes consume.

Construction of 15 much larger turbines at the Blue Creek windfarm in Ohio, USA (these had 100-metre towers and a rotor diameter of 90 metres) required 573 cubic metres of concrete per turbine – about 60 truckloads each.37 Local geotechnical and wind conditions, plus the larger tower and blade size, explain the greater concrete requirements, and Australian experience has demonstrated that moving to 100-metre towers and 90-metre rotor diameters results in yield improvements of up to 40 percent more energy being captured. Note, however that:

The same desultory, myopic argument of course applies to every manufactured product that uses metals, minerals, fuel or chemicals mined or manufactured by industries which also in turn use such materials. Every house, building and motor vehicle is full of these things. But when it comes to concern about the environmental footprint of building and manufacturing, wind turbines are uniquely singled out by their critics. Presumably only wind turbines made from renewable resources like plantation timber would be acceptable to those making this argument. (By the same logic, it could be argued that the materials for the first car factory were likely transported by horse and cart, yet no one claims that horses are therefore superior.)

A good example of this style of thought came from (now ex-) South Australian Family First Senator Bob Day. On 30 April 2015, Day published a post on his website titled ‘Wind turbines’ inconvenient truth’.39 With ‘gotcha’ exuberance, Day noted that wind turbine motors incorporate rare earths, which are often sourced from heavily polluting mining in environmentally blighted inner Mongolia. Highlighted in bold was an excerpt from a 2011 Daily Mail report: ‘Whenever we purchase products that contain rare earth metals, we are unknowingly taking part in massive environmental degradation and the destruction of communities.’ The subtext was plain: green wind energy supporters are indifferent to the environmental damage and human suffering being caused, and so are massive hypocrites.

A small problem with this accusation is that by far the main use of rare earths is not in wind turbine motors, but in a wide range of electronics that include literally billions of mobile phones and computers, which ex-Senator Day and nearly every Australian use daily.40 In fact, only a very small subset of wind turbine manufacturers use the permanent magnets that make use of these rare-earth metals. If Day was ignorant of this fact, and somehow convinced that wind turbines were the only market for these rare earths, his blindspot for the evidence that could have been found almost instantly with the most elementary Google search was surely astonishing. Wind turbines produce energy with virtually no emissions after the initial emissions involved in the construction of the turbine and any additional local infrastructure needed to connect the energy generated to the grid. Getting a wind turbine built and operating has an environmental impact, as does all construction. Today’s giant wind turbines can stand as high as 230 metres from ground to apex blade tip.41 They are made mostly of steel. Depending on the model, they can weigh between 150 and 300 tonnes.42 Producing the concrete slab that anchors the tower and the fibre-glass blades, and transporting it all to the site, necessarily leaves a carbon footprint.

In its inimitable way, the anti-windfarm website Stop These Things (see Chapter 6), in its  anonymous and therefore unaccountable ‘Andy’s Rant’ column, spelt out the whole disastrous folly,43 although disappointingly failed to provide comparable data on the carbon footprint of a coal-fired power station. Andy’s conclusion? Wind turbines ‘will incur far more carbon dioxide emissions in their manufacture and installation than what their operational life will ever save.’ However, US researchers have ‘done the math’ and conducted an environmental lifecycle assessment of two 2-megawatt wind turbines being planned for a windfarm. Their 2014 paper in the International Journal of Sustainable Manufacturing44 concluded that a wind turbine with a working life of 20 years will offer a net carbon benefit within just 5.2 to 6.4 months of commencing energy generation. At the time this book went to press, no critiques of this calculation have been published in any peer-reviewed journal.

‘Windfarms devalue surrounding properties’

Windfarm opponents routinely assert that property values plummet around windfarms. They often throw this claim around in conjunction with statements about residents having to abandon their homes because of the intolerable noise (see Chapter 3). Who would be foolish enough to buy a house that was constantly bombarded by a noise so sickening that it causes people to walk away from their homes rather than put up with it?

Local opponents’ best efforts to publicise the alleged horrors of living near turbines might deter buyers. So the claim that windfarms devalue local properties might be expected to be self-fullfilling, when the same people are fanning buyer concerns. The claim is of course readily testable by comparing housing and land prices near windfarms and in comparable areas nowhere near windfarms. By 2015, the wind-energy blogger Mike Barnard had identified nine quality studies that had examined the relationship between windfarms and property value.45 He summarised their key findings thus:

What about Australian data? Council minutes from 21 August 2012 for the Pyrenees Council in central Victoria, in which the windfarming township of Waubra is located, make interesting reading. The minutes show that residential house valuations in the Waubra precinct rose more than those in any of the other ten precincts in the council area in the preceding two-year period, 2010–12. The average rise across the ten precincts was 3.62 percent; in Waubra the average increase was 10.1 percent.

Of Australian windfarms, the Waubra farm has received by far the largest number of noise complaints (29 individuals have complained).46 It has often featured in media reports about the issue, largely thanks to the Waubra Foundation (see Chapter 6). If there was ever going to be a place where negativity about a windfarm affected property values, Waubra would have been it.

‘Wind turbines kill many birds and bats’

Claims that wind turbine blades cause the deaths of large numbers of birds and bats are often made by opponents, with turbine rotors often referred to as ‘bird choppers’. Claims highlighting the dangers to iconic or rare birds, especially raptors, have attracted a lot of attention. On several occasions, we’ve had people agree that there is poor evidence that windfarms harm human health, but earnestly inform us that they’ve read that the turbines kill lots of birds.

Birds and bats are indeed killed by turbine blades, but their contribution to total bird deaths is extremely low. Three recent studies illustrate this. A 2009 study using US and European data estimated the number of birds killed per kilowatt hour generated for wind electricity, fossil-fuel, and nuclear power systems.47 The author concluded that ‘wind farms and nuclear power stations are responsible each for between 0.3 and 0.4 fatalities per gigawatt hour (GWh) of electricity while fossil-fuelled power stations are responsible for about 5.2 fatalities per GWh’ – nearly 15 times more. From this, the author estimated that ‘wind farms killed approximately 7,000 birds in the United States in 2006 but nuclear plants killed about 327,000 and fossil-fuelled power plants 14.5 million.’ In other words, for every one bird killed by a wind turbine, nuclear and fossil fuel powered plants kill 2118 birds.

A Spanish study involving daily inspections of the ground around 20 Andalusian windfarms with 252 turbines in the four years between 2005 and 2008 found 596 dead birds. The turbines in the sample had been operational for between 11 and 34 months, with the average annual number of fatalities per turbine being just 1.33. The authors noted that this was one of the highest collision rates reported in the world research literature on this subject. Raptor collisions accounted for 36 percent of total bird deaths (214 deaths), most of which were griffon vultures (138 birds, or 23 percent of deaths). The study area was in the southernmost area of Spain near Gibraltar, which is a migratory zone for birds into Spain from Morocco.48

Perhaps the most comprehensive report was published in the journal Avian Conservation and Ecology in 2013 by scientists from the Wildlife Research Division of Environment Canada.49 Their report sought to quantify causes of human-related avian deaths, drawing together data from many diverse sources that included both traumatic deaths by feral and domestic cats, bird collisions with and electrocution by man-made structures, oil spills, mining and agricultural deaths (including pesticide poisonings and harvester deaths), and hunting. Table 1.3 shows selected causes of bird death out of an annual total of 186,429,553 estimated deaths caused by human activity.

In 2013, Loss et al. reviewed available data on bird deaths caused by wind turbines in the USA.50 They noted that earlier estimates of between 10,000 and 573,000 annual deaths were often based on collisions with multi-barred ‘lattice’ towers rather than the monopole towers that are now the vast majority of wind turbine masts. Their revised estimate was 240,000 annual deaths across the USA. The American Wind Energy Association declared that at the end of 2016 there were more than 52,000 turbines operating in the USA, meaning that on average just short of five birds are killed per turbine per year.51

Mark Duchamp, the ‘president’ of Save the Eagles International, is probably the most prominent alarmist on windfarm bird deaths. Here’s a typical statement from him:

Such claims always allude to massive national conspiracies to cover up the true size of the carnage (‘Mark has long been claiming that it was foolish to allow environmental impact assessments to be directed and controlled by wind farm developers.’)52

In Australia in 2006 a proposal for a 52-turbine windfarm on Victoria’s southern coast at Bald Hills (now completed) was overruled by the then federal environment minister, Ian Campbell, who cited concerns about the future of the endangered orange-bellied parrot (Neophema chrysogaster), a migratory bird said to be at risk of extinction within 50 years. The Tarwin Valley Coastal Guardians had been opposing the proposed development. Perhaps the highest-profile objector was the former federal health minister Michael Wooldridge, also a founding director of the Waubra Foundation (see Chapter 6), whose family has an estate nearby.

This endangered bird has regularly been used by interest groups seeking to halt developments,53 including a chemical storage facility and a boating marina.54 The proposed Westernport marina also happened to be near an important wetland, ‘but the parrot copped the blame, even though it had not been seen there for 25 years’, wrote a cynical professor in biodiversity and sustainability.55 The Age reported that modelling ‘suggested a wind farm at Bald Hills alone would result in one parrot being killed every 667 years in the worst case, and 1097 years in the best case.’ 56

The Victorian government’s planning minister at the time, Rob Hulls, described the windfarm decision as blatantly political, arguing that the conservative federal government had been lobbied by fossil-fuel interests to curtail renewable energy developments. Hulls said there had been ‘some historical sightings, and also some potential foraging sites between 10 and 35 kilometres from the Bald Hills windfarm site that may or may not have been used by the orange-bellied parrot.’57

Meanwhile, the British Royal Society for the Protection of Birds built a wind turbine at its headquarters because it recognised that wind power is more beneficial to birds than it is harmful.58

What of opponents’ claims that many bats are killed by turbines? A 2010 review of published and unpublished reports on bat mortality at windfarms in north-western Europe found the estimated number of bats killed per turbine annually was low (0–3) on flat, open farmland away from the coast, higher (2–5) in more complex agricultural landscapes, and highest (5–20) at the coast and on forested hills and ridges.59 The species killed almost exclusively (98 percent) belonged to a group adapted for open-air foraging.

The authors concluded that other than the open-air foraging group, bats are ‘usually not at risk at wind turbines, because they fly below the rotors, but are still killed occasionally’.

‘Wind turbines are a danger to aircraft’

Opponents argue that wind turbines pose a grave risk to low-flying light aircraft such as crop dusters. Every day crop-dusting pilots fly near countless trees, power poles and wires as they go about their work, but wind turbines are argued to somehow pose an unacceptable risk. This is an odd argument because compared to trees, power poles and wires, wind turbines are far less common, tend to be clustered together in obvious ‘farms’, and are much taller and more noticeable than trees and power poles. We do not hear of efforts by agricultural pilots to rid crop lands of all trees and power lines. And we rarely hear from pilots singling out wind turbines as a concern either.

Collisions to date have been extremely rare. In April 2014, a light plane hit a turbine during a major blizzard in South Dakota, killing four, in what was described as a ‘freak collision’.60 But light aircraft often crash into natural hazards like mountains and trees. Australia has guidelines for the siting of wind turbines and other large structures near airports.61 Figure 1.8 shows a water-bombing aircraft in fires near the Waterloo windfarm in South Australian in 2017.

‘Wind turbines are a fire hazard’

Windfarm opponents get excited on the very rare occasions when fires occur in the nacelles of turbines. Photographs of these rare events are recycled in social media with dire warnings about the grave threat burning turbines pose in dry bush country. They argue that wind turbines may be located in hard-to-reach terrain on the ridges of hills, where wind can be optimal, and that they may there catch fire. This is of course nonsense. Wind turbines are always built with extremely good accessibility, which is needed from the outset for the road transportation of the huge towers and thereafter for maintenance access. Moreover, windfarm companies often construct access roads in order to put turbines in optimal areas. These roads can then be used by maintenance staff and landowners. They can also provide valuable access routes to bush fires for rural fire fighters, who would not have these routes were it not for the wind-turbine construction.

Any type of construction in fire-prone areas can of course be fingered as a potential fire hazard. Fires can be caused by electrical faults, kitchen accidents, discarded cigarettes and other negligent actions by residents. Given there are hundreds of thousands more houses than there are wind turbines throughout Australia (or in any nation which has windfarms), and many more fires caused by these other causes than by wind turbines, we might ask why windfarm opponents do not raise concerns about any building in rural areas, or even any human presence in the countryside. Their zero tolerance of wind turbines but their presumed acceptance of rural residences and other buildings clearly exposes their unbridled irrationality on this issue.

There have been three fires in wind turbines in Australia, at Lake Bonney (2006), Cathedral Rocks (2009) and Starfish Hill (2010). None resulted in a bushfire, although one caused a few spot fires that were easily controlled.62 Turbines have not hindered aerial firefighting efforts and no inquiry into the cause of major fire disasters has ever mentioned wind turbines as a hazard. Three state rural fire authorities (New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia) told the 2015 Senate inquiry into wind turbines that turbines were not seen as an obstacle to aerial fire-fighting any more than the various other potential hazards navigated by competent aircraft pilots, such as ‘power lines, transmission towers, mountains and valleys’.63 For example, the Country Fire Authority stated that ‘here are a lot of other, higher-risk areas, like power lines and the like, over wind towers. They are quite visible and they do not cause the aircraft any concern in aviation operations for CFA’.

But the senators who signed the majority report just could not help themselves, stating ‘rural fire services across the country have not properly considered these issues’ before quoting speculation by turbine opponents that turbines, had they existed near past fires, might have caused a problem for firefighters.

In this chapter, we reviewed a range of non-health objections to wind turbines that are commonly made by their opponents. In the next chapter, we move on to consider the entry into the mix of claims that the turbines are a direct cause of health problems in some of those exposed to them.