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Comment, late January 2018
Mr Ridgway's Net site stated that he is Leader of the Opposition in the Legislative Council, Shadow Minister for Tourism, Agriculture, Primary Industries, Food & Wine, Forests and Fisheries.
While it is pleasing to see that the South Australian Liberals under Steven Marshal have become much more pro-renewable power than they were, what does the retention of a man with Mr Ridgway's record of dishonesty in such important positions tell us about the state opposition?
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As mentioned above, Mr Ridgway does not say whether he accepts climate
science; I sent an email asking him on 2013/06/28 and had not received a
reply by 2013/07/18.
There is a near 100% consensus that mankind is seriouly impacting the
world's climate among climate scientists.
Mr Ridgway's Net site was rewritten in the second half of 2013
This page was written based on Mr Ridgway's old Net site.
The main part of this page begins with some extracts from Mr Ridgway's (old)
Net site.
Quotes from Mr Ridgway's page are on the left, the facts are on the right.
(Mr Ridgway's Net site, http://www.davidridgway.com.au, was off-line
from around the time that I mentioned
he was one of the main opponents to the Ceres wind farm on Yes 2 Renewables,
on 2013/07/30, was still off-line on 2013/08/11, but was back by
2013/11/25.)
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Comment
This seems intended to suggest that, to the surprise of the people in the
AEMO, wind turbines don't run at 100% power all the time!
Of course the wind doesn't blow strongly anywhere near all the time so wind
turbines don't generate anywhere near 100% of the power that they might if
the wind did blow strongly all the time.
The average
capacity factor of wind farms in
Australia is around 35%; which means that 100MW of installed wind power will
generate, on average, about 35MW, which is a good figure by world standards.
As for reliability,
wind turbines have an availability of around 97% compared to coal-fired
generators' figure of around 85%.
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Quote 1 from Mr Ridgway's page
"A Parliamentary investigation into the social and economic effects of
wind-driven power stations has heard of a looming
clash between the energy industry and primary production."
"... the Australian Energy Market Operator [AEMO] revealed a large discrepancy
between the installed capacity of wind-driven turbines and the actual power
they could reliably or consistently deliver."
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Comment
It seems likely that here Mr Ridgway picked one of the more ridiculous
unsubstantiated claims out of the submissions because it suited his purposes.
Even the group calling itself the
Heartland Farmers [HF], that has been
set up as the chief opposition body to the Ceres Project wind farm and has
little respect for fact, has not made quite such an outrageous claim (they
claimed 600 square kilometres).
At the recently completed 140-turbine Victorian wind farm,
Macarthur, 62ha of land were
taken out of production due to the wind farm's roads and 'hard stands' (the
cleared areas at the bases of the turbines).
Scaling this figure up for the 199 proposed turbines of Ceres we get a figure
of 89ha taken out of production.
There is no justification for claiming that any more land than this will
be 'impacted' in any significant way.
One need only look at the United States experience to see that wind power
and agriculture are highly
compatible, the three top US states in agricultural production are
also the three top states in installed wind power.
Perhaps Mr Ridgway is suggesting, as some have, that the wind turbines will
impact agriculture because they will stop
crop dusting
aircraft flying in the vicinity.
There is no justification for this claim as can be seen on UTube
where you can see video clips of crop dusting planes flying within a few
metres of wind turbines, see
here and
here.
So far as I have been able to find out, while there are about 200 000
utility scale wind turbines in the world, no aircraft has ever crashed
because of a wind turbine.
Of course ground-based spaying, fertilizer application, etc. can be used, at
little or no extra cost, where planes do not have access due to very close
proximity to the turbines.
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Quote 2 from Mr Ridgway's page
"The investigation will soon travel to the Yorke Peninsula where according to
one submission about 800 square kilometres [
80 000ha] of prime
cropping land would be impacted by the proposed giant Ceres project, which
is now awaiting Ministerial approval."
Even worse
On his page about Gail Gago Mr Ridgway took this even further.
He wrote "just one wind-driven power station on the Yorke Peninsula would
impact about 800 square kilometres of prime cropping land".
In saying this Mr Ridgway made this ridiculous and unsubstantiated claim
his own.
The US state of Iowa is in the heart of the US Corn Belt and is sometime
called the "Food Capital of the World".
Wikipedia,
2013/05/20, stated that the total installed wind power in Iowa was 5137MW
in 2012 (at the same time the total for the whole of Australia was about
2600MW) and that Iowa had the greatest wind power capacity per square
kilometre for any US state.
The area of Iowa is less than two-thirds that of Victoria.
A very high concentration of wind power combines successfully with a highly
intensive and productive grain industry in Iowa making complete nonsense
of Mr Ridgway's claim.
The three US states having the highest agricultural production also
have the most wind power, demonstrating again the
compatibility of wind power and agriculture.
| Crop dusting plane in Mid-North SA
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Aerial agriculture pilots commonly fly very low near Stobie poles,
aerials and trees and SWER lines
a few millimetres thick stretching hundreds of metres between poles,
so large conspicuous wind turbines would be no problem.
And remember that for crop spaying to be done there must be very little wind,
so any turbines in the vicinity would not be operating at the time.
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Comment
There would probably be an area in the vicinity of the cable where ships
would not be able to anchor because of potential damage to the cable and
perhaps trawling operations for prawns would have to be disallowed in the
area for the same reason.
It is very difficult to imagine how this would have any significant impact
on the prawn industry.
A contact with connections in the Bass Strait fishing industry has told
me that the power cable between Tasmania to the mainland has not caused
them any problems.
Claiming that the cable could significantly impact on coastal protection and
marine parks is drawing a very long bow.
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Quote 3 from Mr Ridgway's page
"Peter Blacker [once Nationals MP for Flinders, now Chair of the Regional
Communities Consultative Council] said wind-driven power
stations even had the capacity to create marine disturbances because of a
proposed under-sea cable across Gulf St. Vincent."
[Peter Blacker said] "I fly across that very regularly and there is nearly
always a ship or two anchored out there, so clearly they would have to go
further north to come around that shipping basin.
There is the prawn industry, coastal protection, marine parks, the whole
works."
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Comment
Mr Ridgway has not provided any credible evidence to support his claim of
economic loss to primary production; no evidence for significant loss exists.
The government does not subsidise the wind industry, a bonus is paid to
renewable energy generators in proportion to the amount of power they
generate.
Renewable power generators get roughly an additional 4¢ per kWh of
electricity produced on top of the wholesale price.
The retail price most of us pay for our electricity is around 25¢ per
kWh.
It is true that wind power cannot 'cope with periods of peak demand' neither
can coal or nuclear.
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Quote 4 from Mr Ridgway's page
"When you put together the possible economic loss to primary production,
government subsidies to the wind industry and wind's inability to reliably
cope with periods of peak demand, there are many questions which have to be
answered"
In a
media release David Ridgway expresses disappointment that
wind turbines, towers and blades were not to be manufactured in Australia.
He said "I'd hoped that as the wind power capital of Australia, with over
half the installed wind generating capacity, SA would have had hundreds of
jobs in manufacturing turbines and blades."
This is a remarkable statement to come from a man who, as this page shows,
does all he can to destroy any wind power development in Australia.
His party too, is fighting a war against renewable
energy.
This does not make Australia look like a great place to invest in building
wind turbine components.
It seems to be another exposure of the
two faces of David Ridgway.
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| Median prices for Cape Bridgewater/Cape Nelson –
commissioned 2008/09
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| Median prices for Challicum Hills – commissioned 2003
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| Median prices for Codrington – commissioned 2001
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| Median prices for Toora – commissioned 2002
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| Median prices for Waubra – commissioned 2009
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| Median prices for Wonthaggi – commissioned 2005
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| Median prices for Yambuk – commissioned 2007
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Mr Ridgway starts this Net page with:
"The average temperature on the Yorke Peninsula in February is a toasty 28 degrees.
This year in mid-February the toast burnt; the mercury climbed to 40".
Mr Ridgway, we can expect a lot more of that in the future, it's called
climate change and we need to change from
burning fossil fuels to renewable energy if we are going to combat it.
Mr Ridgway cherry-picks evidence and exaggerates
He wrote "The Federal Magistrates Court in Victoria has ruled that a
property is worth up to 33 (sic) less if a wind farm is built on neighbouring
land."
(It seems that Mr Ridgway meant 33%.)
I don't know where Mr Ridgway got the 33% figure, but an article in The Australian includes a sentence,
"In a decision believed to be the first time an Australian court has
recognised the adverse financial impact of wind farms for neighbours,
magistrate Kate Hughes
ruled
a property would be worth 17 per cent less if a
14-turbine facility were erected next door."
Note, 17% rather than the 33% claimed by Mr Ridgway.
Mr Ridgway has found, in among the masses of evidence that indicate
wind farms do not cause significant
declines in land values, one case that went against the trend.
This use of convenient evidence that suits one's preconceptions, while
ignoring the bulk of the evidence, is called cherry picking.
The graphs on the right show that in all the Australian cases where wind
farms have been constructed close to towns, there has been no tendency for
house and land prices to fall.
Go to the source for facts, Mr Ridgway, not to wind farm opponents
Mr Ridgway quotes Martin Hayes and Tania Stock, two of the main Ceres
opponents, for his information on aerial fire-fighting.
Mr Hayes said:
"Aerial fire bombers will not be able to operate within the vicinity of the
turbines due to visibility issues and wake turbulence, creating a major
risk for the wider community in the event of a significant fire."
CFS aviation manager David Pearce has said:
"We would treat the wind farms exactly the same way as we treat powerlines
that are reasonably high, also radio masts, television towers or even high
structures."
Why quote wind farm opponents if you are interested in the facts Mr Ridgway?
Why not go to the
CFS?
A lie, or at best, a gross exaggeration
Mr Ridgway said "... more and more wind farms are being built closer and
closer to homes, villages and schools."
This is not so Mr Ridgway; you are making it up.
I challenge you to substantiate this claim.
Some turbines of the Ceres Project will be 2km from the small townships of
Port Julia and Sheoak Flat.
While this may be closer than any other South Australian wind farm comes to
a township, it hardly justifies Mr Ridgway's claim.
Something we should be proud of
Mr Ridgway said
"SA has one of the highest proportions of wind power generation in the world.
More than half of Australia's installed wind power is in this State."
In a world where there is a huge and growing climate change problem this is
something of which all South Australians should be very proud.
Tell us who these experts are Mr Ridgway
Mr Ridgway claimed that "... some experts blame [wind generators] for making
SA's electricity almost the most expensive in the world."
Please tell us who these experts are Mr Ridgway; the
experts I've heard
commenting on the matter say it has been the costs of transmission
infrastructure that has been forcing up electricity prices.
Tourism on Yorke Peninsula
Mr Ridgway implied that tourism on Yorke Peninsula will be damaged by the
proposed wind farm, but typically, gave no evidence to support his claim.
There is substantial evidence that
wind farms do not
harm tourism.
It is far more likely that the Southern Hemesphere's biggest wind farm
would be a huge boost to tourism on Yorke Peninsula.
Wind power and agriculture
Mr Ridgway claimed, again without evidence, that wind power was incompatible
with the agriculture on Yorke Peninsula.
As discussed
elsewhere on this page the US state of Iowa
very successfully combines a very high concentration of wind power with an
exceptionally productive agricultural industry.
I have also shown arguments on my
Heartland Farmers page debunking the
claim that wind farms will significantly adversely affect agriculture.
Examine the evidence fearlessly and impartially?
Mr Ridgway said "I invite South Australians from the cities and the bush to
prepare their evidence.
We'll examine that evidence fearlessly and impartially."
Given his obvious bias and careless use of the facts, as demonstrated
on this page, can Mr Ridgway be trusted to be impartial?
I think the answer to that question is pretty obvious.
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| | Prices of houses sold at Edithburgh since 2004
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| Data from
realestate.com.au
Edithburgh is 2.6km from the nearest turbines of the
Wattle Point Wind Farm,
completed in 2005.
No sign of declining property values here.
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Ketan Joshi's take
Ketan wrote an insightful piece on this.
It includes some good graphics.
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Mr Ridgway criticised Greens MP Mark Parnell when the latter
slept under a wind turbine
at Waterloo Wind Farm.
Mr Ridgway claimed that this was nothing but a political stunt.
Mr Ridgway had been planning to sleep in one of the houses claimed to have
been
abandoned
due to noise from the same wind farm, but apparently this was not a stunt!
So the answer to the question seems to be that a stunt is a stunt when
someone else does it, but is not a stunt when it is done by Mr Ridgway.
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| Waterloo turbines and campsite
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| | Evening of 2013/05/28
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Mr Ridgway, Mr Parnell and Russell Wortley, all being members of the South
Australian Parliamentary Select Committee on for wind power, slept one
night in an abandoned house about 2km from the turbines of the
Waterloo Wind Farm.
Mr Ridgway was quoted by the ABC as saying:
"I couldn't really hear any distinctive
noise that I could say was coming from the wind farm".
and
"At times we thought we could hear something when we were standing outside
and I just spent the last hour or so lying in bed listening hard, but the
wind is in the wrong direction so it's blowing the noise away from us."
Mr Parnell said that the wind was blowing directly toward them from the
wind farm early in the night, but, perhaps not surprisingly, Mr Ridgway did
not mention this.
A short segment by 9 News is on
U Tube.
It was stated on the segment that the house is two kilometres from the
turbines.
Bob Lamb and Ally Fricker also featured on the video clip.
They live eight or nine kilometres east of the wind farm, on the far side
of the Totthill Range of hills are have long opposed wind farms.
Ms Fricker said that "they [the turbines] were incredibly noisy at our place
last night as a matter of fact".
Can the reader believe that?
The turbines were inaudible 2km away, yet were "incredibly noisy" 8km away
on the far side of a high range of hills?
Tom Richardson, of the InDaily, wrote a piece on the sleep-over.
He wrote "Personally, I couldn't hear a thing above the snoring
resonating from the rooms around me."
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Links to references
As usual in my pages, the links given in this piece will take the reader to
references and arguments relevant to the point being made.
An exaggeration
Mr Ridgway was apparently happy to accept the claim from Dr Sexton that the
turbine foundations would each require "up to 3000 cubic metres of concrete"
the
figure that I have from the Ceres people is "a maximum of 475 cubic metres",
and this is if the foundations are what is called 'gravity' type; if there is
suitable bedrock to which they can be bolted they can be about half this size.
Lie of the month for June 2013
I keep a page for the most outrageous and unbelievable lies that I have
come across about wind power.
This one was well worth the place as
Lie of the month for June 2013.
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Mr Ridgway was reported in the Yorke Peninsula Country Times of 2013/06/18
as publicly quoting some figures from
Dr Roger Sexton about the carbon
impact of wind farms.
Dr Sexton made a presentation on behalf of the Black Point Progress
Association.
It seems that Dr Sexton, who is an economist, "argued it would take as long
as
3580 years for a wind driven power
station to recover" the carbon
dioxide emissions from the construction of the wind farm.
Let's just give this some thought in the context of
the world wind power industry.
World-wide wind power has been
growing
at an exponential rate for several decades.
In 2011 alone, China
installed around
17GW of wind power (at the end of 2012 the
total wind
power in Australia was about 2.5GW).
Can the reader believe that the energy experts all over the world are busy
installing thousands of turbines each year when the whole thing is grossly
counter-productive?
Mr Ridgway implied that most of the carbon dioxide involved was released
from the making of the cement in the footings of the wind turbines.
The actual time in which a wind farm
'pays back' the CO2 component
of the
footings is not 3580 years, but rather a very few days.
A similar claim made by wind power opponents relates to how long a wind
farm takes to pay back the
energy used in the construction of the
whole wind farm.
The actual figure for this is around five or six months.
If one looks at the
carbon intensity of
wind farms it works out at about 10 or 12 grams of CO2 per
kWh of energy generated.
The corresponding figure for coal is about 1000.
Considering another way of looking at this question, wind farms
abate
around one tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) for each megawatt-hour
(MWh) of electricity that they generate.
The Ceres wind farm, if built, will
generate about two million MWh each year.
Mr Ridgway claimed that the wind farm construction would be responsible for
releasing a total of 398 000 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere
(although how this figure was arrived at we were not told).
From these figures we can simply calculate that the wind farm will abate
the CO2 in a fifth of a year.
Yet Mr Ridgway accepted and repeated this 3580 year claim, apparently without
any checking, any serious consideration, or any thought that it might be
absolute nonsense!
Naomi Bittner, Chair of the Heartland Farmers, a group opposed to the Ceres
wind farm on Yorke Peninsula, is quoted on one of
David Ridgway's Net pages as saying:
"We know that these turbines can shift spray drift from one paddock to
another and, if the spray is not compatible with that crop in the other
paddock, it will kill it."
I emailed Dr Bittner asking her to substantiate her claim; I received no
reply.
This is a bizarre claim, but it seems that Mr Ridgway is willing
to repeat anything that appears to cast wind turbines in a bad light, no
matter how incredible.
The blades of modern wind turbines don't come any closer to the ground than
about 30 or 40m.
When a farmer (or an aerial spraying contractor) is spraying, using chemicals
that will be toxic to adjacent crops, they have to be very careful that as
little as possible of the spray drifts anywhere.
Most spraying has to be done when there is little or no wind; in which case
nearby turbines would not be operating at all.
How spray could get up 30 or 40m above the ground to be picked up by a wind
turbine and then 'shifted' to another paddock, if the spray operator is doing
his job properly, is unimaginable.
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| My photo used on Mr Ridgway's Internet site
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Some success
On 2013/07/07 it seemed that Mr Ridgway had removed, not only my photo, but
also the misleading and dishonest
brochure from
his site.
However, on 2013/07/17 I could still download the brochure following a
Google search.
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The photo on the right, which I took on 2011/06/28, has been used by the
Liberals in the
brochure named "Wind farms can
generate angst".
The brochure features on several pages of Mr Ridgway's Net site.
I have no recolection of ever having been asked for permission for the use
of my photo, nor would I ever have given permission for the purpose for
which the image was used.
The caption under my photo used in the Liberal's brochure read
"Construction of the Snowtown wind farm in South Australia's mid north
dwarfs the house in the foreground, demonstrating how close to residents the
Government is willing to build wind turbines.
Photograph taken by Dave Clarke, February 19th 2011."
The turbine is about 1.8km from the house, making a lie of the statement
in the brochure (need I say that this is not the only lie in the brochure).
The use of this image, without asking me for permission, is quite
unethical; but to use it dishonestly and misleadingly and claim that it shows
a wind turbine close to a house when this is quite false, compounds the abuse.
I first used the photo on my Net pages on the
Snowtown Wind Farm section.
Further action
I had a letter to the Editor about the Liberal's use of the image published
on 2013/06/26 in the Clare Northern Argus.
While several emails to the Liberals and to Mr Ridgway concerning the use of
my photo had previously been ignored, Hendrik Gout of Mr Ridgway's office
contacted me following the publication of my letter.
His initial contact was by email.
He asked that I telephone him.
I told him I wanted to keep all correspondence in writing.
He ignored this, phoned me and claimed that I had given permission for the
use of the image.
On 2013/06/28 I requested that he provide evidence of this; no evidence has been provided.
I have given permission to various parties to use some of my photos under
certain conditions.
Of course I would not give permission for the use of one of my photos on
a misleading and dishonest anti-wind brochure, particularly for Liberal
Party propaganda, considering their anti-renewables stance; so if I ever
did give permission it would have been because I was misled about who was
to use the photo, and for what it was to be used.
Whether or not Mr Ridgway accepts the fact of anthropogenic climate
change, climate scientists and the more informed of the world's population
do accept it and know it to be a coming disaster.
I don't know if Mr Ridgway has grandchildren, but suppose that he does
and consider what might
happen if they look into the history of climate change in fifty years time
when everyone has seen how much harm it has done and is continuing to do.
They will see that Australia was among the very worst of the climate
polluters, while it had 0.3% of the world's population they will see that it
produced 1.5% of the world's greenhouse gasses.
And perhaps they will look into their grandfather's part in climate change
action.
(It will still be on the Internet, if there is still an Internet.)
They will find that their grandfather not only did not press for action to
limit climate change, but actively opposed the introduction of renewable
energy.
How will they feel about their grandfather, one of the more outspoken
Austraian politicians against climate change action?
I wonder if Mr Ridgway gives any thought to how the people of the future
will view his actions?
Does it concern him?
Gone missing?
I wrote an article titled "Main objection to Yorke Peninsula wind farm shown
to have no substance" for the 'YES! to renewables' site.
It was
posted 2013/07/30.
The article referred to Mr Ridgway as one of the "most publicly active
opponents" of the proposed
Ceres wind farm of Yorke Peninsula.
At about that time Mr Ridgway's net pages were shut-down.
As I write this, on 2013/08/06, they are yet to come back.
Why is this?
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Which would you prefer, Mr Ridgway?
| Coal-fired power stations such as these at Port Augusta?
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| or clean, non-polluting, wind turbines such as these near Jamestown?
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While Mr Ridgway obviously is opposed to wind power, he doesn't say what he
believes the alternatives are.
Would he prefer:
- No action to slow
climate change?
- Go back to coal fired power stations with their air pollution
that kills many and makes even more seriously
ill?
- Nuclear? (SA could have its own Fukushima!)
- Burn gas (it's not quite so polluting as coal) until we run out of it?
Mr Ridgway is one of those who can find fault with renewables because it
suits his selfish aims and political ambitions to do so, but he doesn't have
any realistic alternatives to offer.