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Wind power acolytes exhibit all the hallmarks of a cult. 20 years on, and anyone with critical faculties can explain in a sentence why wind power will never amount to meaningful power generation source. But the cultist still believes – running on a mix of blind faith, ignorance and blissful stupidity.
Cults are never big on facts or evidence – indeed their defining attribute is their ability to shout down anybody with an objective viewpoint that challenges the herd. This is a crowd who treat wind turbines as objects worthy of divine worship (see above).
The trouble for the wind cult is that the big players across Europe have already started crab walking away from supremely ambitious renewable energy targets, plumping for nuclear and, in some cases, scrapping those renewable energy targets, altogether.
Rather than careening towards the precipice, Europe’s policymakers have (not so quietly) pulled the plug on their once grand plans an all wind and sun powered future.
Here in Australia, the cult blunders on, largely because our MSM refuses to publish anything contrary to their narrative, and the shift in energy policy in Europe is most certainly contrary to that narrative.
Which brings us to this video interview featuring Nick Hubble and Nigel Farage (transcript follows).
Nick and Nigel have a merry old time exposing wind power for what it is: the greatest economic and environmental fraud, of all time.
Wind Power Racket Exposed at Last
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Nick Hubble and Nigel Farage
2 February 2024
I’ve been warning about wind energy for years. But yesterday’s exposé from Bloomberg was a surprise to even Nigel Farage and I. You won’t believe what wind power producers have been up to, at your expense.
And if Siemens Energy Chairman Joe Kaeser told The Telegraph, “Every transformation comes at a cost and every transformation is painful. And that’s something that the energy industry and the public sector – governments – don’t really want to hear.” Then are governments accurately anticipating the cost of the energy transition?
And if they aren’t, what will the true costs be?
And if they’re unaffordable, what are we going to do?
If you take a step back, you’ll begin to realise what’s really going on here…
Wind energy is just a racket wrapped up in a green parcel.
This is precisely what happens when you are not allowed to question the consensus on something like green energy. This is something Nigel Farage doesn’t exactly shy away from however he might be lampooned for it. For years, he told us wind energy would disappoint.
But now, even the German Greens Party is having second thoughts.
Find out what’s gone so dreadfully wrong in our energy system and what could happen next in this video with Nigel Farage…
Transcript
Nick Hubble: In one of our earliest videos for Fortune and Freedom, I asked Nigel Farage about wind power and what he made of it. What followed was a pretty interesting interview, to say the least. He told some interesting stories, but I think it’s time to update our viewers on what’s happened since, because with wind power now about forty percent of the UK’s electricity supply, there’s been a lot of news, and it’s not looking so great.
Nigel, I wanna start though by revisiting that extraordinary story you told us last time around when you talked about the debate that you were in with some prominent politicians, because I think that really highlights what’s actually going on here.
Nigel Farage: Yeah. I mean, look, because it’s green, because it’s all, you know, gonna add towards our net zero targets. Nobody criticizes any aspect of wind energy whatsoever. If that Boris Johnson kept bubbling on, about us being the Saudi Arabia of wind. And every time there’s any wind farm project, the BBC News at ten, say, here’s this wind farm, it’ll power three million of the homes, in Bristol and the Southwest. No questions asked. No debate of any kind at all. And if you question it, you’re you’re screamed at and the finger is pointed. They go red in the face, and they scream “Denier!”, as if somehow, you know, you’re sort of evil, virtually accused of witchcraft, by these people.
I’ve been deeply sceptical about the wind industry from day one, for two reasons, really. The first is that it gives intermittent energy, and therefore, Nick, when you introduce me and say, wind produces forty percent of our needs, no. On a bad day, it’s less than one percent, and that’s a massive problem because you have to have backup. And I’ve been told since 2000, don’t worry, Nigel. There’s no problem.
We’re gonna have battery storage for the excess electricity, while we haven’t got it yet. And my understanding is, you know, you’d need a battery store something like the size of Surrey, to try and keep the electricity, and it would cost a fortune and it diminishes pretty quickly. So, that’s the first reason, that I’ve been sceptical about wind. It gives intermittent energy, but actually what you need is consistent solid base-load power, to use an actual grid. You have to be able to control it. That’s that’s the key issue, isn’t it? Even if it’s, yes, if the wind blew consistently, but you can’t dial it up and dial it down, you’re still not getting any power. No. And, you know, as I say, we have these days, often this time of the year, funnily enough, you know, if you get a very big anti-cyclone that sits over the North Sea for a week, then what you get are very low temperatures, record demand for electricity and heating, and you’ve got a problem. And we’ve seen outages, in other parts of the world, Texas, you know, went down the wind route, and found itself with power outages. We’ve seen it in many parts of the world.
The idea that, in the modern world, we’d lose electricity, but we’d lose everything. You know, our mobile phones couldn’t charge, our computers wouldn’t work. We’re more reliant on electricity today than we’ve ever been at any point since it was first discovered.
The second reason, I’ve always been sceptical about the wind industry, and especially the offshore industry, is it’s so blooming expensive; that without vast amounts of subsidy, it simply cannot stand on its own two feet, and it cannot compete.
Now what we’ve been learning, from a very enlightening piece on Bloomberg of all places, is about curtailment costs. So what’s that you ask? So when the wind’s blowing, really strong, and the wind turbines around the country are all operating or nearly all operating at their maximum capacity, then produces too much electricity. So they have to turn the machines off, and we pay them to turn them off. No joke. This is a big serious hit. You pay them because these costs are added to your electricity bill. You’re paying a twenty percent premium on your domestic electricity bill to subsidize renewables, and so we now pay them not to produce electricity because we can’t cope with the excess demand. And the racket that’s been exposed by Bloomberg, is that what these wind energy companies have been doing is they’ve been grossly overestimating the amount of energy they can potentially produce, so they get even paid more when they’re not producing, not that they could have produced it in the first place. And that is a total utter racket at every single level.
Nick Hubble: Let’s just highlight this in a particular way, Nigel. You told me, just before we started recording this that you’ve installed a wind turbine on your house. How much energy do you think that wind turbine might have produced over the last few days, and how much money do you think you should be paid for it?
Nigel Farage: Yeah. Well, I might be, you know, I mean, I might boil a kettle with it, you know. There are examples, of people living in rural areas with exposed landscapes where they can put a little wind turbine up. And they could generate a fair degree of electricity. That is true. At a micro level, it might work in certain circumstances, but the initial cost of putting anything up, however big or small, you know, it’ll take you eight to ten years to even begin to think that you might break even and that’s against a massive capital outlay cost to begin with, but the idea you can run a national grid?
With a situation where you’re relying on that forty percent of it comes from wind, and a government in opposition who would determine to triple the journey to meet our targets, they need to build eighteen thousand more wind turbines, which is now in 2030. And the recent auction there was a recent auction for windfarm sites in the North Sea, there wasn’t a single bidder. Because the amount of subsidy governments are promising for the future is less than it’s been in the past.
We’ve also been paying wind energy companies for what they produce. But we’ve also been paying them over the course of the last couple of years, the equivalent of what the gas price would be. So when we had the withdrawal supplies from Russia, they were being paid far more than any previous gentleman’s agreement. So it’s the consumer paying the bill. It is British industry that is suffering.
We have the highest electricity cost in the whole of Europe by far, and our electricity and gas costs are always exactly double what they are in the United States of America. And you wonder why when you look at GDP figures. Across the west, you know, for the last seven or eight years, you wonder why you know, we’ve grown at nearly ten percent. The Eurozone has grown at about seven percent. America’s grown at fourteen percent. And access to cheap reliable energy is a very major part of why America is doing so much better than we are, more indeed much of the rest of Europe.
Energy is an absolutely vital part of our life, of our economy, of our industry, and we’ve got ourselves into this bizarre position in Britain where there is no debate. There is no debate. I mean, Sky News have a climate hour every night, where they eulogize about wind energy, about heat pumps on the side of your house. Well, look, you know, in an ideal world, in an ideal world, fine. We’d have carbon, you know, carbon-neutral energy, but you got to remember. Once we’re handicapping ourselves in this way, leaving ourselves at risk of having genuine blackouts, of seeing consumers ripped off by rackets such as the one that Bloomberg has exposed, we’ve got China, India, and Indonesia, they’re the big three. Burning coal, you know, billions of tons a year, I’m not exaggerating. Literally billions of tons of coal every single year. And I think at some point, there’s gonna be a rethink.
I think the farmer’s protests across Europe are the first signs of the public saying, well, hang on a second, you know, because these farmers are being told, that they can’t have as many cows on their land because of their backside emissions, if I can put it like that. They’re being told what nitrogen they can use on the soil. They’ve been heavily regulated, all of it in the name of meeting net zero targets and what’s really interesting politically is whether it’s Italy or Poland or France or Germany, the finger of blame is being pointed very, very fairly and squarely at the European Commission in Brussels. The political implications of all of this, I think when it comes to the European elections, which conclude on the ninth of June this year, are enormous. We’re going to see a very, very large, Euro Skeptic swing, and much of this is around climate policy, much of this is around unaffordable and can I say unachievable net zero targets.
Nick Hubble: I read today, I think in the German media that the German Greens party is trying to rein in their European allies in the European parliament to try and sort of wind back some of these green policies. So that’s how extreme things are on, in the European Union. I want to dig in just a little bit more to this Bloomberg story just to be absolutely clear that these companies get paid to not produce energy, but they then ask, well, how much energy would you have produced? That’s right. And they’ve apparently, they’ve just been exaggerating things a little bit. So I thought I’d wanted to give you the opportunity to say that this wind turbine on your house is producing lots of energy, and now you shouldn’t get it.
Nigel Farage: Yeah. I can, yeah, I could do with a curtailment payment as well. And I get the point you’re making. Now I mean, look, you know, it it it it there seems to be a total lack of scrutiny in this area, a refusal to criticize or condemn in any way practices that go on within this industry, and that’s because of the consensus view, you’d love it. Don’t forget that the 2019 piece of legislation committing us to net zero, went through the houses of Parliament without a vote. Wasn’t any debate. Just nodded through. Because everyone agrees. So, yeah, at every level, we have been be ripped off by this industry from day one. It’s been of very little economic benefit. The theory of wind energy is great. The practice is, as I say, it’s intermittent, it needs subsidy, it’s damned expensive, we’ve been putting ourselves at a huge disadvantage by going down this route.
Nick Hubble: Nigel, it’s free. It’s free. Okay. This, this curtailment issue was not the only scandal that’s broken over the last few weeks We’ve also got this issue of the climate change committee supposedly using only one year of data, in order to estimate the amount of energy storage needed to try and make wind, less intermittent.
The part of this that interests me is that when we estimate how expensive wind is, we don’t attribute the costs of making that energy reliable to the cost of the wind power. To me, surely, if you’re gonna compare something like the cost of a gas or a coal or nuclear power plant to wind energy, you’ve got to compare them based on what it would require to make wind and solar and other renewable forms of energy reliable, that’s got to be included in that cost. And it seems like that’s one of the other places that they manage to fudge how much this is going to cost as well. And it’s a crucial part. So if it is exposed, that the costs of actually storing energy is going to be uneconomical, what are they gonna do next? Cause they’ve created this vast industry, 40% of electricity, depending on how you count it. If they can’t store the energy, what are they gonna do?
Nigel Farage: But they can’t store the energy. They can’t store the energy, which is why I repeat the word unachievable. What they’re trying to do is unachievable. And that’s why, of course, you know, we have to have gas back-up. And it’s why there is a very big debate about nuclear energy going on across the Western world.
The problem is our first major project in Hinkley, with the Chinese and the French GDF company, appears to be not going very well, running massively over budget, but rest assured that the logic, that nuclear energy, whatever it’s caused some problems, but nuclear energy gives you reliable baseload power, you know exactly what a nuclear station is gonna produce, twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. There will be a big political switch to nuclear and you mentioned the German greens a moment ago, even they have dropped their objection, the Germans are moving back towards nuclear. That is where this is going over the course of the next few years. I have no doubt about it.
Nick Hubble: My last question is about some of the comments from Siemens Energy. I think it was the CEO possibly the chairman. He called some of the aspects of net zero as they’re being presented to us, a fairy tale. He commented that every transformation and energy transformation comes at a cost and every transformation is painful. That’s not how it was sold to us, though. And it seems to be he is saying something that the public sector and governments don’t really want to hear.
It seems to me that they’re not listening now to the very people who’ve been selling them the products. So, you know, if Siemens Energy can’t, you know, make a decent case, for one, suppose the governments have been telling us that energy is going to be cheaper and it’s not going to be painful and it’s going to be lots of storage. If even those companies aren’t making the case, who’s left?
Nigel Farage: Well, that’s right. I mean, it often is the political class that are the last edifice to fall. The public wake up, the farmers start rioting, Paris is under siege, even Siemens engineering, say, whoa, hang on a second. This is all based on a series of false assumptions. In the end, the inevitable will happen. But you see it’s difficult because, you know, our political class have given up God. There’s no more religion being replaced by climate change. That is what they believe in. That is what unites them. And, you know, at the last few elections, they try to show their virtue by out-greening each other in terms of telling us what they’re gonna do, and how much good they’re going to do for us and for the world. So they’ll be the last part of this to fall, but fall, I promise you, they will.
Nick Hubble: Are you worried about energy shortages, periodic energy shortages when the wind doesn’t blow, and the sun doesn’t shine?
Nigel Farage: Yeah. I’ve been worried for some years about energy shortages; that we’ve come blooming close. Once or twice, hasn’t happened to us, has happened elsewhere. South Africa has been through a spate of energy outages over the course of the last year and, you know, all that is doing is accelerating the decline of the South African economy, and South Africa as a country, Texas perhaps is a better warning to us of what we think to be a modern, go ahead state. Biden is still pushing ahead with these massive, hugely subsidized green energy plans, but, no, the farmers of Europe have woken up, everybody else will too.
Nick Hubble: One last thing, Nigel, because what kills me about all this is when we do suffer these energy shortages, the households and the industries in various different countries, including the UK, are asked to dial back their energy demand, you know, in California it’s don’t charge your car, and it will pay you to use less energy. And the media reports of these events celebrate it all as a success. I would have thought that there is no bigger example of the disastrous consequences of the green energy transition than the fact that we’re required to not charge our cars and turn off our industries now. But the media celebrate. It kills me.
Nigel Farage: Yeah. We’re traveling less. We’ll use less electricity. We won’t go to Spain on our holiday, and these are all advances. As we move back to the lives that our great-grandparents had in the 1920s. Apparently, this is some form of progress. Well, you see, that’s the point, isn’t it? And when it becomes a religion, you can justify almost anything in its name.
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