Senator Nick Xenophon barking up the wrong turbine tower

Introduction

The USA experience on electricity prices The 11 US states that get more than 7% of their electricity from wind energy have seen their electric prices decrease by 0.37% over the past five years, in contrast to all other states, where electricity prices have increased 7.79% during that time. From Climate Crocks

He blames wind power for high electricity prices, ignoring a statement from the Chief Executive of the Energy Supply Association of Australia (ESAA), Matthew Warren, who has said:

"One of the major effects of this increased supply of renewable energy [mainly wind power] in a shrinking national market is to suppress the wholesale price of electricity."

Senator Xenophon is in favour of solar-thermal and geothermal (see here). These options are certainly to be supported, but while solar-thermal is somewhat more expensive than wind power, geothermal in Australia is yet to be proven to be viable at all.

By his campaign against wind power, Senator Xenophon is harming the fight against climate change. We must move away from burning fossil fuels or face irreparably damaging the planet; we cannot afford to let ill-informed people stand in the way of intelligent and much-needed action.

I have contacted Nick a number of times to try to point out to him that his opposition to wind farms is not based on facts, but he seems not willing to accept anything positive about wind power; hence I have written this page.

Below some of Senator Xenophon's anti-wind power statements are considered and refuted.

Power generation, SA, May 3-15, 2016 Data from Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO); graph by Giles Parkinson The graph: more technical The dark brown represents coal-fired power, the various shades of light brown and orange represent power coming from several types of gas-fired generators. The ragged line at the bottom of the graph records power being imported and exported through the interstate interconnector power lines.

Get real Nick; wind power is a reliable source of the renewable energy that we must change to if we are to combat climate change.
To not use wind power is to try to tackle climate change with one hand tied behind our backs.

The graph on the right shows how much wind power South Australia's wind farms were generating at the time the state's last coal-fired power station shut down; the green area represents wind power.

We must use all the forms of renewable energy generation that we can. In 2016 wind power is the cheapest, although solar is catching up. Power generation using biofuels can be competitive, but the amount of available fuel is very limited; wave and tidal power are much more expensive; hot rock geothermal power has been tried for years, but has not been shown to be a practicality; hydro-power is not an option in dry and relatively flat South Australia.

Nick must realise by now that he has been wrong on wind power, but unfortunately he has dug himself into a hole and it is hard for him to get out.

There were at least two errors here:

• Senator Xenophon has said a number of times that wind energy is unreliable, this is quite false, in fact it is highly reliable;
• Wholesale electricity prices have been falling. The Chief Executive of the Energy Supply Association of Australia (ESAA), Matthew Warren, has been quoted as saying "One of the major effects of this increased supply of renewable energy in a shrinking national market is to suppress the wholesale price of electricity."

Nick brings up 'health concerns' in his first statement. The box on the right gives a very short summary of why no-one should believe that wind turbines cause illness. Following the links will provide more information an any of the points.

Ms Mangiarelli should have pointed out to Nick that there is no valid evidence that wind turbines cause health problems. Instead, she supported him, showing that she was also ill-informed.

Then Nick said that the health concerns are "justified on the scientific evidence" and "that low-frequency noise actually causes health problems". This is quite false; again, see the box on the right. Low-frequency noise must be many times louder than any produced by wind turbines to be harmful to health.

Nick said that wind farms impact on property values. A number of surveys have been done into this question, the conclusion is that while there may be a slight decrease in property values when a wind farm is proposed and during construction, but no long-term effect.

Nick talked about "worldwide implications". I suspect he is unaware that in non English speaking counties there is very little concern about any connection between wind turbines and ill-health. It seems that these people have not been told that if they live anywhere near a wind turbine they should be sick; so they are not sick. (See the Nocebo effect)

Nick said that "the scientific evidence is that in some cases [the distance between homes and turbines] needs to be at least 10 kilometres. Nick, this is just about worth adding to my page that lists the wind power lies of the month! The only 'justification' for anything like a 10km set-back comes from completely unscientific claims of Sarah Laurie.

Nick said that "Norway and Scandinavian countries" (sic) are putting wind turbines out to sea because of health concerns. Again, not true; it is because they have far less suitable land available than we do in Australia and far higher population densities. Off-shore turbines cost twice as much as on-shore turbines – I don't think people want more increases in their power bills. According to Wikipedia, Denmark (a very small and densely populated Scandinavian country that has more wind power per capita than any other nation) has quite a few off-shore wind farms, Sweden has only one wind farm with more than 10 turbines. Norway is not mentioned in regard to off-shore turbines and has far more hydro than wind power.

Nick said that SA has "fantastic geothermal renewable energy potential". That's true, but no-one has yet managed to get it beyond the pilot plant stage, while wind power is well proven to be succesful at both providing power and reducing greenhouse gas production.

Senator Xenophon: "There are smarter ways for producing renewable energies and wind is the lazy way of doing it."

Reply Why should anyone generate electricity the hard way if there is a perfectly good easy way?

Senator Xenophon:"With 50 per cent of the nation's wind farms, South Australia has too many eggs in the wind farm basket at the expense of base load renewable technology such as geothermal and solar-geothermal." (Sic. Probably an error introduced by Wind Watch; Nick most likely said solar-thermal rather than solar-geothermal.)

Reply Nick is right to want more divers renewable energy, but how does South Australia's wind power come 'at the expense' of geothermal and thermal? There is no reason we could not have both. The problem with geothermal of the hot-dry-rocks type, as we have in SA and as Senator Xenophon well knows, is that no-one has viably done it anywhere in the world. Solar-thermal is great, but unfortunately more expensive than wind.

Emissions intensity on the Australian NEM Graph credit – Professor Mike Sandiford, University of Melbourne; data from the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO)

Senator Xenophon:"The problem with wind energy is it is intermittent and unreliable, and fails to deliver the carbon savings it spruiks because coal-fired power stations have to be kept on standby in the event the wind dies down."

Reply Shame on you for this one Nick; that is bordering on outright lies. While wind energy is variable, it is highly reliable.

As for failing to deliver carbon savings, the graph on the right shows emissions intensity (EI) from the four large states in the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM) and the average for the whole of the NEM, including Tasmania. (Tasmania's EI is off-scale at the bottom of this graph.) Note the very large decline in South Australia's EI; due almost entirely to the introduction of wind power.

Also, an extensive report sponsored by the US Department of energy stated unambiguously that

"Wind- and solar-induced cycling has a negligible impact on avoided CO₂ emissions."

There has always been a dynamic balance between electricity supply and demand, the advent of wind power has not significantly changed this and therefore, so far as I have been able to find out, there is no more standby power than there ever was.

Nick has probably got his misinformation about abatement and coal-fired power stations on standby from anti-wind campaigner Hamish Cumming who has been pushing this fallacy, especially with the anti-renewable 'Environment Editor' Graham Lloyd of The Australian. Nick, as stated elsewhere, rarely talks to anyone who is in favour of of wind power, but is often influenced by the anti-wind power lobby.

Capital costs for power generators Graphic from the Frontier Economics report

The Frontier Economics report "Possible future retail electricity price movements A REPORT PREPARED FOR THE AUSTRALIAN ENERGY MARKET COMMISSION December 2012" contains the graph on the right which shows geothermal, that Senator Xenophon is so keen on, as being four times the price of wind power!

And, as mentioned elsewhere on this page, while South Australia does have hot rocks in abundance, no-one, anywhere in the world has yet managed to develop this energy source to the full commercial stage. (There is a 1MW pilot plant at Innamincka in SA's Cooper Basin; ie. a third of the installed capacity of a single modern wind turbine.)

Interestingly, the Frontier Economics report that was mentioned by Senator Xenophon and commissioned by the Liberal Coalition and Senator Xenophon, "The economic impact of the CPRS [Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme] and modifications to the CPRS" mentions wind power only once in passing and does not mention geothermal power at all.

The relatively small community owned Hepburn Wind Farm, did get a government subsidy.

Senator Xenophon warns about health problems but then he says that he has legal advice that people could sue for nuisance. Why not for ill-health? Surely his legal advice was that a suet for ill-health due to wind turbines would fail from lack of credible evidence.

Senator Xenophon seems to have no concerns about the health effects of not having wind farms. For example, the figures 24 deaths and 225 serious illnesses per Terrawatt-hour (TWh) of coal-generated electricity were published in the prestigious journal, The Lancet. If The Lancet figures are applicable to Australia, that means 4 700 deaths and 44 000 serious illnesses due to coal-fired power stations in Australia each year.

Interestingly Senator Xenophon has talked to both the ABC and The Border Watch (a Mount Gambier, SA, newspaper) about people sueing for nuisance, but not for health problems caused by wind farms. Was the legal advice that he received to the effect that there would be no grounds for sueing for health problems because of a complete lack of credible evidence?

The twenty-first century life style that we live must have energy, it must be generated somehow, if not by clean, sustainable methods that have not been shown to have any adverse health effects, what would Senator Xeonophon suggest, more coal, Nuclear? Couldn't people also sue for nuisance, or something far worse, if a coal or nuclear power station was built nearby?

We can chose one of two theories that seek to explain this:

Theory 1 The symptoms are caused by the nocebo effect, often combined with fear and anxiety (as discussed in the opinion of a clinical psychologist);

Theory 2 The symptoms are caused by something coming from the wind turbines; in which case we must also accept that: Something unknown to science is coming from the wind turbines – or there is some quality in the sound of wind turbines unexplained by science – to cause the symptoms, because we know that the sound (including infrasound) is not loud enough to be harming anyone; There is a huge range in people's susceptability to whatever it is that is coming from the turbines; for example wind farm workers who have thousands of times the exposure of 'affected people' are almost always unaffected. We must suspend the inverse square law of physics as it would normally apply to anything coming from wind turbines; The dose-response relationship, that applies to all other environmental diseases, does not apply to 'wind turbine syndrome', or is even reversed; There is something different happening around wind turbines in the English speaking world, because very few people in non-English-speaking countries develop these symptoms.

Which theory sounds the more plausible?

The principal of Ockham's Razor tells us that if more than one hypothesis fits the available evidence then the simplest one is to be preferred. One is also reminded of the Sagan Standard in which exceptional claims call for exceptional evidence to support them. There is no scientifically acceptable evidence supporting the 'Wind Turbine Syndrome' claim.

The USA experience on electricity prices The 11 US states that get more than 7% of their electricity from wind energy have seen their electric prices decrease by 0.37% over the past five years, in contrast to all other states, where electricity prices have increased 7.79% during that time. From Climate Crocks

1. He said it would increase electricity prices. This is quite false. The Australian Energy Market Operator has shown that wholesale electricity prices have been falling from 2006 to 2012 – the period in which most of Australia's wind farms have come on-line. Also, the Chief Executive of the Energy Supply Association of Australia (ESAA), Matthew Warren, has said "One of the major effects of this increased supply of renewable energy in a shrinking national market is to suppress the wholesale price of electricity." See here.
2. He said that wind power is unreliable. This, too, is false; wind power is variable, but it is highly reliable, and it is becoming more predictable all the time as wind forecasting improves. See here.
3. He said "you have to switch it off on hot days". In fact it is very rare for a wind turbine to be turned off because of extreme heat. For example, Challicum Hills Wind Farm experienced 15 minutes of shut down due to heat in 2004; that is 0.003% of the year. Also see here.
4. He said that South Australia has more wind power than the rest of Australia combined. This is false. At the end of 2013 SA had 1205MW of wind power installed, the total for Australia was 3050MW. See here.
5. He implies that wind power is not suitable for agricultural land; ignoring the fact that the USA experience shows that wind power is highly compatible with agriculture. (For example, Iowa, sometimes called the "food capital of the world" is about 2/3 the size of Victoria, has the highest concentration of wind turbines per unit area in the USA and twice as much wind power as the whole of Australia.)
6. He said the wind turbines make fire fighting more difficult. In fact the Country Fire Services are quite relaxed about fighting fires near wind turbines and say that the roads make accessing fires much easier. See here, here and here.

1. Hot rock geothermal, the only type of geothermal available in SA, is yet to be shown to be viable anywhere in the world.
2. Tidal power is also yet to be proven economically viable on a commercial scale other than in particularly well suited places; it is questionable whether there are such places in SA.
3. While solar thermal is highly desirable, commercially viable and has the advantage of having the option of storage of heat to be used after the sun stops shining, it is more expensive than wind power.

Senator Xenophon (unjustifiably) complained about the cost of wind power and then suggests that it should be replaced by either unproven, unviable or more expensive alternatives.

On 2012/11/29 I sent him a copy of Philosopher Peter Singer's book, 'How are we to live?' and the letter below.

This may well be true for very high levels of low frequency noise, but the evidence is that wind farms produce very low levels of low frequency noise. The South Australian Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) produced a report titled "Infrasound levels near windfarms and in other environments" in January 2013. Extracts from the Executive Summary:

• "Infrasound levels at houses adjacent to wind farms ... are no higher than those at houses located a considerable distance from wind farms."
• "... there did not appear to be any noticeable contribution from the wind farm to the G-weighted infrasound level ..."

More responsible independent members of parliament such as Rob Oakshot, Tony Windsor and Andrew Wilkie see no harm in wind power. Is Nick Xenophon just chasing sensationalism and publicity?

Nick claims that wind power is expensive, but in fact it is highly competitive with fossil fuels (and enormously cheaper than the hot-rock geothermal that Nick likes so much). As reported by the ABC, the Australian Capital Territory government has contracted with the operator of Hornsdale Wind Farm to buy electricity for $77/MWh.