Does using wind or waves to power our grid actually make sense? Is it really sustainable? The air and oceans move constantly and with a purpose. Air and sea currents move moisture and heat around the planet. Waves and ocean currents move nutrients that feed aquatic plants and animals, wash shores and bays, preventing stagnation, and move oxygen from the atmosphere into the water, providing life for sea denizens. Both air and sea currents are used as migration paths for animals.
What happens when we remove energy from wind and waves? Wind farms remove energy from the atmosphere and put that energy onto the grid as electricity. This is not “free” electricity. As with all things, it comes with a cost.
While converting the kinetic energy of wind into electricity, wind turbines modify exchanges between the ground and atmosphere, and affect the transfer of energy, momentum, mass and moisture within the air.
Downwind of wind farms, the land is no longer being cooled by evaporative cooling of the passing wind; it is being warmed. How much? About 1.5 degrees:
This warming is the result of wind turbines actively mixing the atmosphere near the ground and aloft while simultaneously extracting from the atmosphere’s motion.
Is 1.5 degrees important? Climate cultists enthusiastically answer “Yes!”
Another supposedly "sustainable" generation technique involves using the sea – waves and tides – to transfer energy from the sea to the grid.
Again, what happens when energy is removed? What happens to the delicate ecologies at the shore, in tide-pools, marshes and coral reefs, and to migrating sea creatures once the waves are reduced and current strengths lessened? Far less water and oxygen, and fewer nutrients, flow across these fragile habitats. The vital, live ocean becomes a dead, dirty, stagnant bathtub. Ocean currents and waves transfer the majority of the sun’s heat around the planet. What happens when we remove energy from currents and waves at scale? We don’t know.
The climate faithful who worship at the shrine of Saint Greta cannot answer, because they've never even thought about it; to them, there are no consequences attached to any of their actions. But what about those higher up the environmentalist food chain? If they – in the name of "progress" – are removing trillions of tax dollars from productive use; destroying the economy; inflating our currency, and thereby stealing our earnings, one would imagine they were at least aware that their "climate" tactics have nothing to do with their stated goals.
That's because they don't. Windmills warm the land, decimate bird populations, damage rainforests. Ocean generators destroy fragile ocean ecosystems the Greens demands we save, not to mention the whales inhabiting it.
They are not stupid. They know what they are doing. They must be stopped.
Article tags: climate change, Energy, Environment, environmentalism, global warming, green energy, wind and solar
