Turbine Failures and Plunging Stock Add to Growing Doubt Over Wind Industry
An increase in the failure of wind turbine components and the subsequent financial fallout are creating uncertainty about the true sustainability of an industry that’s campaigning for green energy.
Siemens Energy announced on June 22 that it would be withdrawing its profit assumptions and initiating a technical review of Siemens Gamesa’s onshore wind farm, which could cost more than $1.1 billion.
“This is a disappointing, bitter setback,” Siemens Gamesa CEO Jochen Eickholt said in a June conference call. “The quality problems go well beyond what had been known hitherto, in particular in the onshore area.”
The mechanical problems could affect 15 percent to 30 percent of the company’s wind turbine farms and take several years to repair.
The day after the announcement, Siemens Energy’s shares fell more than 37 percent.
The company said it expected challenges to “ramp up” offshore as well.
Siemens Energy is a subsidiary of the German conglomerate Siemens. Siemens Energy’s wind farm business, Siemens Gamesa, is a global company based in Spain that constructs onshore and offshore turbines in Europe and the United States.
The company began an investigation into a damaged turbine at the Santo Agostinho wind farm that French energy company Engie SA is building in the northeast of Brazil, Bloomberg reported.
The installation—which is part of Siemens Gamesa’s new 5.X model of onshore wind farms, with turbine blades as long as 262 feet—has faced numerous quality control issues and has been shut down for the investigation.
Since Siemens Gamesa’s announcement, a spokesperson confirmed to Recharge on July 5 that a blade had broken at the Santo Agostinho wind farm.
‘More Severe Than I Thought Possible’
Media outlets and spokespersons blame the issues on the increasing costs and decreasing availability of raw materials caused by the COVID pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which has left competing companies with challenges in meeting deadlines while rattling the confidence of investors.
Siemens Energy CEO Christian Bruch said during a June conference call that the setback is “more severe than I thought possible.”
“Siemens Gamesa will incur high losses this year and will take longer to reach an appropriate level of profitability,” Mr. Bruch said. “We also have to see that we have an urgent requirement to fix the corporate culture. Too much has been swept under the carpet.”
In 2022, Siemens Gamesa announced a layoff of 2,900 employees, with further cuts predicted, EnergyWatch reported.
“It is never easy to make such a decision, but now is the time to take decisive and necessary actions to turn the company around and ensure a sustainable future,” Mr. Eickholt said. “We need to build a stronger and more competitive Siemens Gamesa to secure our position as a key player in the green energy transition.”
‘Uncharted Territory’
Nicholas Green, head of industrial technology at the global asset management firm AllianceBernstein, told CNBC that the rate of expansion has pushed wind energy into “uncharted territory” that has led to “an industry-wide issue.”
“It wasn’t that Siemens Gamesa is a bad operator, as such, it’s that actually some of the normal protocols and time in use, operational data in use, is relatively limited,” Mr. Green said.
In addition to the availability of materials, the rapid expansion is creating challenges not only for supply and demand, but also for engineering.
Christoph Zipf, a spokesman for WindEurope, told CNBC that 20 years ago, a normal wind turbine would have a capacity of 1 million watts, while today, they’re testing at 15 megawatts (15 million watts).
“This means that turbines have become bigger as well, posing challenges to components (quality, materials, longevity),” Mr. Zipf wrote in his statement....
During a visit to the Block Island Wind Farm in Rhode Island in late May, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm praised America’s first offshore wind farm as a model that should be followed throughout the rest of the country, The Providence Journal reported.
“We want to replicate this, even bigger, all up and down the Atlantic seaboard, but also in the Pacific and in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Great Lakes,” Ms. Granholm said. “We want to be able to generate clean energy all across America.”
However, the Block Island Wind Farm, like other installations, has faced multiple problems.
Meghan Lapp, a representative for a commercial fishing company in Rhode Island who also works in fishery management, told The Epoch Times that the installation is “rarely working” and has frequent maintenance issues.
“A couple of years ago, 4 out of 5 of them went offline for months because they have stress fractures in the rotors,” Ms. Lapp said. “This year, one of them will be offline all summer for repair. It’s been one disaster after another.”
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How to silence a climate change zealot
I’ve never understood the fascination dogs have with the wheels of cars which is demonstrated as they come running out to bark as you drive by, but there are few funnier things in life than watching what happens when the dog catches the car.
One time I was in a street looking for an address, and as I slowed, a dog came running out at me. About 100 metres down the road I found the address I was after and pulled over. As soon as this happened, the barking and snarling dog came to an abrupt halt. It stopped barking. A look of puzzlement came over its face, and it timidly turned and trotted away.
The same thing can happen with Climate Change zealots. I’ve worked out how to silence them, deflate them, and see them trot timidly away, hopefully with a few questions to ask themselves.
How do we do this? Well, we simply let the dog catch the car.
A while ago I wrote an article where I assessed the various approaches that can be taken to debunk the ‘climate change’ orthodoxy. In brief, our choices are:
The world isn’t warming.
If it is warming, we aren’t causing it.
If it is warming, it’s not a bad thing.
If it is warming, we can’t do anything about it anyway.
Most sceptics focus on one of the first two approaches. For years, I’ve been prosecuting the third one. In my article, I argued that we take a leaf out of Konstantin Kisin’s book and abandon these in favour of the last one.
That is, we say ‘What can we do about the climate crisis?’ We no longer argue against the existence of a ‘crisis’ and say ‘What can we do about it?’ Metaphorically, we let the dog catch the car. ‘There’s a crisis? Okay – what do we do about it?’
I’ve been pursuing this process on my Twitter account (@ThugRaffles) for a couple of months now, with fascinating results. In fact my pinned tweet says: ‘The question that, it seems, no one can answer is, “What do we do about the #climatecrisis #ClimateActionNow #ClimateAction #climatechange #ClimateEmergency”?’
At the time of writing it has been viewed about 400 times, and not a single reply. That is, it has been seen by people that make liberal use of these hashtags, but no one can answer it.
So I have taken a proactive approach and pursued it with various accounts that post using these hashtags. Mostly, I just get no reply. This, of course, puts you in a position where you can say, ‘I didn’t get a reply to my question. Do you really believe in action on climate change, or are you a denier?’
One account replied with a general tweet about climate change, to which I replied, ‘Do you acknowledge that there is a climate emergency?’ The response was, ‘I’m not here to discuss policy.’ My reply was, ‘I didn’t ask about policy – I just asked if there was a climate crisis. Do you acknowledge there is a climate crisis or are you a denier?’ After several more iterations, in which he continued to evade what ought to have been an easy question, he blocked me.
Another account said that we needed to reduce greenhouse gases, which led to the following exchange (paraphrased and summarised):
‘You mean CO2?’
‘Yes.’
‘Cool. So what’s the current level of CO2?’
‘I don’t think that’s the real issue.’
‘I don’t understand. Didn’t you say that CO2 was too high? I googled the result and came up with 0.0421 per cent. Is that right?’
‘That’s carbon, not CO2.’
‘Fair enough, what’s the real figure then?’
*blocked*
I haven’t kept track of how many times I’ve asked this question of people, but it’s now clear that the question will not be answered. I suspect the non-repliers fall into two categories. Firstly, there is Joe Public, who has vaguely heard that we need to ‘take action’ but has no idea what the consequences will be.
This ignorance extends to the level of CO2 in our atmosphere and the change that would ensue if we all went and lived in solar-powered caves. I saw a Senate enquiry in the US where some bureaucrats on a government committee regarding energy policy were asked, ‘How much CO2 is in the atmosphere?’ Amid all the puzzled looks, none of them had the slightest clue, with most people settling on ‘about 4 per cent’ which is out by a factor of 100.
In the second category are ‘climate’ scientists who know the answers to these questions, but keep quiet about it as they know that any changes made to human CO2 emissions will be a drop in the ocean.
At about this point, a serious sceptic will raise this issue – how can I, in good conscience, pretend to agree there is a climate crisis when I know there isn’t? It’s a fair question, but the good news is you don’t have to. There are essentially two ways around this:
When a person says that there is a climate crisis we simply abandon any attempt to contest the issue and say, ‘Okay, so what do we do about it?’ This question does not acknowledge the truth of what they are saying, but essentially asks them what we should do if it’s true.
If put on the spot by a believer, we simply tell the truth and say, ‘I’ve not seen any evidence of the climate crisis myself, but acknowledge that if it is true, we should do something. You say it’s true? Fair enough – what should we do about it?’
So this is a memo to Rowan Dean, Andrew Bolt, Jennifer Marohasy, Senator Malcolm Roberts, and Ian Plimer. Twenty years of trying to prove that either the world isn’t warming, or if it is, we aren’t doing it, or if we are, a warmer world isn’t a bad thing have failed. And not only failed, but failed spectacularly, with not a single journalist, scientific body, or major political figure straying from the orthodoxy. Not one.
As the saying goes, one definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. It ought to be obvious that if it hasn’t worked yet, it’s not going to suddenly start working now.
The only journalist prosecuting this case is Chris Kenny who has asked the very simple question, ‘How will the climate change as a result of Labor’s Net Zero policy?’
So let’s try something new – get in the Nicholas Reece’s of this world and put the question to them, very simply, about how we address climate change.
You will probably find most or all of the following are true:
They don’t know the atmospheric concentration of CO2 as a percentage. Some know it as ppm, but this doesn’t have the immediate significance of quoting it as a percentage.
They don’t know how much CO2 is man-made.
They don’t know how much man-made CO2 comes from Australia.
They don’t know by how much the atmospheric CO2 concentration will change if Australia went to Net Zero.
They are unable to say by how much the global temperature will change if these changes are made.
They are unable to say how the climate will change as a result of these changes.
And the point is this – anyone that says that we need to ‘take action’ ought to know these things. They ought to be able to tell us, in exact terms, exactly what this action should be and what effect it will have. They ought to be able to say, ‘Net Zero will reduce global CO2 to X, which will lower global temperatures by Y degrees. This will result in a Z per cent drop in cyclones etc.’
In other words, if they cannot rattle off these figures off the top of their heads, then they are fools to ask us to take action with unknown outcomes – and if they are being honest with themselves, they know it. The goal of the polemicist is to simply make them be honest with themselves.
The issue becomes not the figures themselves, but the fact that they don’t know them. We can say things like, ‘You don’t know how much CO2 is in the atmosphere? How do you know it’s too high then?’ Or, ‘You can’t say by how much CO2 will change if we go to Net Zero? Why not? Why are you calling for action when you don’t know what the outcome will be?’ And, ‘You can’t say by how much global temperatures will change if we go to Net Zero? Why not? Isn’t that the whole point of the exercise?’
In short, you put the onus on the believer to explain why they do not have this information at hand. And I’d be asking questions like, ‘Can you see that these are reasonable questions? Can you see that if you’re calling for a reduction in CO2 emissions you ought to be able to say what effect those emissions will have?’
This is such an obvious issue that I cannot but help think that in their mind a little voice will say… ‘Actually, he has a point – you should know the answers to these questions.’ They may walk sheepishly away as they start asking themselves some questions.
But let’s consider what happens if the discussion gets to the point where numbers are discussed. The latest figure I can find forCO2 levels is 421ppm. The point about this is that it is measured to three significant figures. That is, it is 421, and not 421.0 (four significant figures) or 421.00 (five significant figures).
To explain this concept, let’s say we measure a length of a running track at 100m. Strictly speaking this means only that it is between 99.5 (since by convention. 5 is rounded up) and 100.4. If we now say the running track is 100.0m, we are saying the length is between 99.95 and 100.04m and so on.
So that means that a CO2 concentration of 421ppm is between 420.5 and 421.4 ppm. Let’s now perform some calculations and see what numbers pop out.
Man-made CO2 is 3 per cent of the global budget, and 1.3 per cent of that comes from Australia. Thus, 421 x 0.03 x 0.013 is 0.16. If we subtract that from 421 we arrive at 420.84 ppm. As the original figure was only three significant figures, we can only quote this figure to three significant figures, which gives us a value of 421 ppm.
The three significant figures quoted for CO2 measurement would represent the LOD (limit of detection) of the measurement technology. This would be a handheld device (using a Wheatstone bridge) that would give you an on-the-spot reading to three significant figures.
Is greater sensitivity available? Yes, it is, with laboratory-based measurements. A GC-FID measurement will measure down to a further order of magnitude, to give us four significant figures. This means that only with the most sensitive measurements possible, it may be possible to measure at a level that would detect a change in global CO2.
Thus, we can say that as a result of Australia going to Net Zero, the concentration of atmospheric CO2 will change from 0.0421 per cent to 0.0421 per cent which is a change so small that it is undetectable by normal measuring technologies.
Of course the follow-up questions may be these:
How many coal-fired plants does Australia have?
How many coal-fired plants does China have?
At what rate are China building coal-fired plants?
How many weeks will it take for China to build more coal-fired plants than the total number in Australia?
Once again, if the goal of the exercise is reducing global CO2 levels, the Climate Change zealot ought to have these numbers to hand. And the answers make a mockery of any efforts of Australia to reduce CO2. In order, they are 14, about 1190, 2 per week, and 7 weeks.
In discussing this issue there is, however, a fascinating irony. This is that most people that say that they are taking an evidence-based approach to the climate issue do not practice what they preach.
Suppose that I said that I’d developed a device that would reduce the fuel consumption of your car by 10 per cent. You fit the device to the car, conduct extensive tests over 20 years, and conclude that it didn’t work. What manner of idiot, then, would say, ‘Oh but let’s keep trying it. It’ll work soon.’
And yet that’s what most climate sceptics do. They’ve spent twenty years prosecuting arguments that just haven’t worked! An entire generation of youth have now been indoctrinated with climate hysteria, and it’s the mantra of every mainstream media organisation and political party.
Not one, not a single individual has been persuaded by all the books, social media posts, and op-eds. Not one!!!
And yet, astonishingly, these people still keep trying to use arguments that haven’t worked. It brings to mind a classic scene from Blackadder Goes Forth. The grand plan of the British High Command is to make a frontal assault on the German lines. Rowan Atkinson says, ‘You mean the same thing that we’ve tried seventeen times previously and hasn’t worked?’ Regretfully, this satirical comment reflects the approach of most climate sceptics.
So why do these arguments persist? Because they are right! All these arguments are factually and scientifically correct. The world isn’t warming, CO2 is not driving the climate, and there is nothing bad about a warmer world. These are all true – but here is the point – people have been indoctrinated to believe the experts (who say what the government want them to say) and these arguments are simply never going to work.
So what do we do? We agree with the experts. We let the dog catch the car! Then we stand back and watch the fun as we say to the experts, ‘Okay, what do we do now…?’
The choice then is this. We can take the Blackadder approach, and try something different, or we can take the General Melchett approach and make a frontal assault on the German lines because, you know, this time it will work…
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/how-to-silence-a-climate-change-zealot/
***********************************************Electric Vehicles: Costly Virtue Signaling Forced on America by Left
The Left likes to treat skeptics of electrical cars as if they were Luddites. Truth is, making an existing product less efficient, but more expensive, doesn’t really meet the definition of innovation.
Even the purported amenities and technological advances EV makers like to brag about in their ads have been a regular feature of gas-powered vehicles going back generations. At best, EVs, if they fulfill their promise, are a lateral technology.
Which is why there is no real “emerging market” for EVs in the United States as much as there’s an industrial policy in place that props up EVs with government purchases, propaganda, state subsidies, cronyism, taxpayer-backed loans, and edicts. The green “revolution” is an elite-driven, top-down technocratic project.
And it’s increasingly clear that the only reason giant rent-seeking carmakers are so heavily invested in EV development is that government is promising to artificially limit the production of gas-powered cars.
In August 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to set a target for half of all new vehicles sold in 2030 to be zero-emission. California claims it is banning combustion engines in all new cars in about 10 years. So, carmakers adopt business models to deal with these distorted incentives and contrived theoretical markets of the future.
In today’s real-world economy, Ford projects it’s going to lose $3 billion on electric vehicles in 2023, bringing its EV losses to $5.1 billion over two years. In 2021, Ford reportedly lost $34,000 on every EV it made. This year, it was losing more than $58,000 on every EV. In a normal world, Ford would be dramatically scaling back EV production, not expanding it.
Remember that next time we need to bail out Detroit.
Then again, we’re already bailing them out, I suppose. Last week, the U.S. Energy Department lent Ford—again, a company that loses tens of thousands of dollars on every EV it sells—another $9.2 billion in taxpayer dollars for a South Korean battery project. One imagines no sane bank would do it. The cost of EV batteries has gone up, not down, over the past few years.
Ford says these upfront losses are part of a “start-up mentality.” We’re still pretending EVs are a new idea, rather than an inferior one. But scaremongering about climate and a misplaced romanticizing of “manufacturing” jobs have softened up the public for this kind of waste.
In the real world, there is Lordstown. In 2019, after General Motors—which also loses money on every EV sold—shut down a plant in Lordstown, Ohio, then-President Donald Trump made a big deal of publicly pressuring the auto giant to rectify the situation. CEO Mary Barra lent Lordstown Motors, a new EV outfit, $40 million to retrofit the plant. Ohio also gave GM an additional $60 million.
You may remember the widespread glowing coverage of Lordstown. After Biden signed his “Buy American” executive order, promising to replace the entire U.S. federal fleet with EVs, Lordstown’s stock shot up.
By the start of this year, Lordstown had manufactured 31 vehicles total. Six had been sold to actual consumers. (Most of them would be recalled.) The stock was trading at barely a dollar. Tech-funding giant Foxconn was pulling its $170 million. And this week, the company filed for bankruptcy.
Without massive state help, EVs are a niche market for rich virtue-signalers. And, come to think of it, that’s sort of what they are now, even with the help. A recent University of California at Berkeley study found that 90% of tax credits for EVs go to people in the top income strata. Most EVs are bought by high earners who like the look and feel of a Tesla. And that’s fine. I don’t want to stop anyone from owning the car they prefer. I just don’t want to help pay for it.
Really, why would a middle-class family shun a perfectly good gas-powered car that can be fueled (most of the time) cheaply and driven virtually any distance, in any environment, and any time of the year? We don’t need lithium. We have the most efficient, affordable, portable, and useful form of energy. We have centuries’ worth of it waiting in the ground.
Climate alarmists might believe EVs are necessary to save the planet. That’s fine. Using their standard, however, a bike is an innovation. Even on their terms, the usefulness of EVs is highly debatable. Most of the energy that powers them is derived from fossil fuels. The manufacturing of an EV has a negligible positive benefit for the environment, if any.
And the fact is that if EVs were more efficient and saved us money, as enviros and politicians claim, consumers wouldn’t have to be compelled into using them and companies wouldn’t have to be bribed into producing them.
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Europe Demonstrates False Underlying Assumption of Mainstream Environmental Policy
A July 2022 International Monetary Fund working paper found that in Europe, within the prior year, “oil prices had doubled, coal prices tripled, and natural gas prices increased more than fivefold.”
Further, about half of all inflation could be linked to this increase in energy prices. And perhaps most importantly, the study noted: “Higher energy prices tend to be regressive: They typically hurt poorer households more than richer ones.”
Much could be said about why this energy calamity has occurred. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is undoubtedly the main component. But we should not forget—as politicians in Europe are fond of doing, perhaps for political expediency—that the invasion would not have had such a profoundly damaging effect had Europe, and Germany in particular, heeded the yearslong warnings not to make their economies all too dependent on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Those warnings were ignored, especially by then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
What’s perhaps most remarkable, however, is that neither the German government nor the European Union has changed its tune since toward a more sensible energy policy.
The sensible thing would have been, at the very least, to leave the nuclear plants open, or even better, to expand nuclear energy.
Energy dependence would have been diminished had such a course of action been taken. Alas, with the Green Party being part of the German government, nuclear power is a boogeyman that needs to be destroyed by any means necessary—even if “the science” tells them that it could be a great boon for the energy transition that Germany has been so keen to pursue.
Thus, this spring, Germany shut down its remaining nuclear plants in the middle of an economic and energy crisis and soaring inflation.
The nuclear phaseout, in conjunction with soaring energy prices that hit poor households in particular, is just the tip of the iceberg of a major problem of environmental policy today around the world; namely, that to protect the environment, to save the planet, and to transition to a cleaner energy future, average people and the economy overall have to suffer. (And they had better stop complaining!)
Most of European environmental policy has followed this scheme over the past decades: To help the environment, the government determines an environmental problem and then does everything it can to eliminate it by limiting its supposed economic or industrial source.
Thus, the approach is largely regulatory and prohibitive.
It follows the precautionary principle that tries to eliminate any risks, but also eliminates any possibilities for innovation. That’s the case also when it comes to nuclear skepticism, in which massive opportunities for a cleaner environmental future are eliminated due to irrational fears of some activists—despite the support for nuclear among the general population.
“Verbotskultur,” as the Germans call it—“prohibition culture”—has been the name of the environmental game in Europe.
This need not be the case, however. In fact, by eliminating any opportunities for entrepreneurship and innovation, governments are eliminating the most promising ways of solving what they see as a climate crisis.
As such, a rethinking of both environmental and energy policy is needed.
It would need to be a path in which government takes a step back and expands freedom for the participants of the market economy to do good. It would be an approach that empowers those environmental entrepreneurs by leaving room for them to improve the world.
That’s the proven way of free enterprise.
This isn’t mere theory. It has been reality for decades, and we can see it not only in individual cases of market environmentalist success stories, but economy-wide.
If one compares The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom with the Environmental Performance Index, one thing becomes abundantly clear: The more economic freedom there is, the cleaner an economy is.
The “science” is clear: Economic freedom and environmental quality go hand in hand. Thus, we can also say that economic growth (which is the result of economic freedom) goes hand in hand with a green future.
Three years ago, Christopher Barnard of the American Conservation Coalition and I presented more proof on this very point in our book “Green Market Revolution.” But unfortunately, current events in Europe prove that much more needs to happen to move environmental policymakers and activists away from the false dichotomy of economy versus the environment.
The false choice between growth and clean air is a dangerous delusion that we need to overcome as we work toward a future that is both pro-growth and pro-planet.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/07/20/false-underlying-assumption-mainstream-environmental-policy
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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