Fourteen wind energy myths debunked

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How many ways can you misinform, distort and spin in a single radio interview? On 9 May, 2011, Max Rheese, executive director of the organisation with the grossly misleading name Australian Environment Foundation, attempted to set a new record on Radio National’s conservative Counterpoint program in Australia. He managed 14 whoppers about wind energy in Australia in 17 short minutes.

Mr Rheese’s role is to provide negative information about wind energy. He exceeds his mandate, heading straight into massive and consistent disinformation. Virtually every word out of his mouth about wind energy is provably wrong.

This article takes each point and provides the wind reality, Mr Rheese’s counter-factual claim and the data that debunks him. At the end, there are brief outlines of both the misleadingly named Australian Environment Foundation and Mr Rheese.

Wind Reality 1: Wind power is cheap and saving Australian consumers money

The claim:every megawatt of wind power costs between $120 and $130 to produce. If we compare that to the likes of natural gas, and again, he states $54 per megawatt hour, or coal which is around about $38…

The data: According to the Australian Energy Market Operator, coal generation cost is up to double the amount of 3.8 cents per kWh Mr. Rheese selected and applies only for the dirtiest brown coal generation with extremely low fuel costs. He didn’t even pick the average price, he picked the lowest price and the one with by far the worst negative externalities.

Given that the average negative externalities of coal are 17.8 cents USD per kWh, cheap coal power is extremely expensive. The range of prices then, is from absolutely filthy 3.8 cents per kWh generation to extremely filthy 7.6 cents per kWh generation. (

What about wind? Well, according to the most recent study available, new wind generation is coming in at 5-7 cents per kWh full lifecycle cost of generation without subsidies according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US for 2012- 2013 new generation. As Australia’s wind resources are on average better than North America’s, Australia new wind farms and repowered wind farms will tend to be at the higher end of the capacity factors and lower end of the cost range, all else being equal. Australia doesn’t have quite the critical mass of domestic manufacturing and construction that the USA has built with its PTC, but is trending in that direction. (

And in Australia, wind energy is actually saving consumers money as the way energy is bought, wind energies extremely low marginal costs actually suppress prices at peaks. The Renewable Power Percentage for 2012 is 9.15%. This means that 9.15 LGCs must be retired for every 100 MWh delivered by retailers. At an average of $40 / LGC, consumers are seeing $366 added to every 100 MWh = $3.66 / MWh = $0.366 cents/kWh. i.e. the Renewable Energy Target is costing consumers around a third of a cent
/ kWh. This is massively offset by the way the market operates. Currently, they are saving consumers about $7 a year with relatively little wind penetration, but it’s adding up. (

Verdict: WHOPPER x TWO

Wind Reality 2: Free wind for 20-25 years offsets initial capital costs

The claim: The reason for that is because of the expense of wind turbines, we are talking about…an
industry benchmark of around $2.5 to $3 million per megawatt to construct a turbine.

The data: Claiming that wind turbines are too expensive by cherry-picking a single data point out of their full lifecycle costs is like claiming that coal is expensive because a Caterpillar dump truck in an open pit mine costs $2 million. It’s an irrelevant but catchy factoid. The energy industry and rational people actually pay attention to full lifecycle costs of electricity as the levelised baseline for comparison. Wind plants have extremely low costs of operation compared to every other from of generation, so the blip of capital costs is eliminated by the advantage of not having to pay for fuel, and the reality that decommissioning wind farms in preparation for repowering is often profitable through scrap and secondary markets for older wind turbines. Energy analysts in Australia who don’t have a bias know this, as do their counter-parts in the California Energy Commission and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (which has a mere 13 Nobelists to its roster). That’s why new wind energy is at 5 – 7 cents per kWh, comparable with or better than new generating capacity that is acceptable on the grid
today. (

Verdict: WHOPPER

Wind Reality 3: Wind farms generate electricity 75%-85% of the time

The claim: But it’s also the erratic nature of wind that only produces power for a small portion of the
time therefore there is not a good use of the capital that is being sunk into all these wind farms.

The data: Well, actually wind farms generate energy about 75-85% of the time, otherwise known as the vast majority of the time. Mr. Rheese undoubtedly knows better, but he’s playing ignorance of what capacity factors are to slip one by.

And to be clear, capital costs are spread across the life of the wind farms and are factored into the business cases. As many hydro dams have capacity factors of only 40% due to seasonal droughts and water management schemes, Mr. Rheese’s arguments would apply tenfold to them, as hydro dams are vastly more expensive than wind farms. Natural gas generation often have capacity factors of less than 10% as they are used solely for on-demand peak requirements; does this mean we should not build natural gas generation? Hence the use of levelised costs.

Verdict: WHOPPER

Wind Reality 4: Wind subsidies level a playing field that’s been tilted for decades

The claim: And then there is the renewable energy certificate which is granted for every megawatt hour that is put into the grid by the energy company, and currently they are around $40, $45.

The data: Like most jurisdictions, there are numerous very large and very long running subsidies for other forms of generation, subsidies that massively outweigh the subsidies for renewables. Dr. Chris Riedy, an Australian researcher into sustainability has assembled a complete picture of fossil fuel subsidies in Australia and it’s well into the billions.

It should also be remembered that the large coal fired generators in Australia were built with government money. As were the powerlines dragged out into the middle of nowhere. Australia, like most other countries, heavily subsidised the construction of the fossil fuel generation system.

This is similar to North America, where renewables subsidies are dwarfed by fossil fuel, nuclear and hydro subsidies. It is interesting that these forms of generation have been around for 60 to 600 years and are still subsidised, yet people against wind turbines aren’t spending time attacking them.

Eliminating subsidies for other forms of generation, combined with the low 5-7 cents per kWh cost of modern wind energy, would immediately level the playing field.

Subsidies for wind power allow them to compete on a tilted playing field, and one that is tilted in favour of coal generation, with it’s 17.8 cents per kWh negative externalities.

Verdict: WHOPPER

Wind Reality 5: Wind power keeps getting more efficient and effective

The claim: Most commentators regard wind power as a mature technology. […] So one would not
expect that there’s going to be a major change in the efficiency of turbines.

The data: Actually modern wind farms in every wind category from the lowest to the windiest have
been getting more efficient and are continuing to. Here are a few of the innovations that are continuing today wind turbine height, mechanical efficiency through the elimination of gearing, wind condition specialisation, aerodynamic improvements, optimised maintenance, robustness reducing failures, wind modeling advances, instrumentation and automation of wind turbines to spot problems early and adjust them more finely to the actual conditions, advanced materials and advanced coatings.

Verdict: WHOPPER

Wind Reality 6: Wind turbines consume very little electricity from the grid

The claim: Any wind farm in Australia is rated at around about 30% of capacity. So whatever the nameplate capacity of that turbine is, 2 MW, 2.5 MW, the expected capacity will be 30% of that just because of the erratic nature of wind. So a large portion of the time, turbines are operating but not producing any electricity. During this time they are drawing on the grid because they have air conditioning, they need to keep the machinery cool, other machinery…these are vast engineering feats, these enormous turbines, and they have a lot of machinery that needs to be kept cool and kept operating. Whenever the turbine is not producing electricity, it is drawing on the grid.

The data: We’ve already debunked the whopper over wind turbines not generating electricity the majority of the time, so this claim has already had most of the air let out of it. It got its start with Eric Rosenbloom, a long-time anti-wind advocate and current President of the US National Wind Watch on his collection of badly researched and argued pieces against wind that he maintains. In that material, he claimed that wind turbines consume more than 50% as much energy as they produce annually. The variant on the them that Mr. Rheese uses is that Mr. Rosenbloom referenced blade heating systems to avoid icing, while Mr. Rheese references air conditioning.

According to Epuron spokesman Martin Poole, their wind turbines use simple radiators like those in cars to draw heat away from blades when they are operating and don’t air condition them at all. Consultation with several industry representatives confirmed that there are no known turbine designs in Australia that feature air conditioning.

Outside of short duration draws at start up – and remember, wind turbines generate electricity 75-85% of the time and will often continue generating for weeks, so start up doesn’t occur that often – wind turbines generate all of the electricity that they consume.

All power stations draw power from the grid when they are not operating, and all draw power from their own generation when operating (known as parasitic load).

Hepburn Wind has confirmed that over the first 11 months of operation, the wind farm generated 320 times as much energy as it consumed from the grid.

Full-lifecycle energy costs are the industry standard mechanism for assessing the relative costs of different forms of generation. LCAs are performed to ISO standards, are published and are subject to external review, so accuracy tends to be very high, and distortions pointed out by competitors.

What is relevant from these LCAs is that every step of manufacturing, transport, construction, operation, maintenance and dis-assembly is captured and quantified. Consumption of electricity by wind turbines is not captured or referenced in the analysis and reviewers do not call this out as a concern.

These full-lifecycle analyses are done for every form of generation, which makes comparisons fruitful and interesting. Here’s a chart comparing European options across all forms of generation based on full-lifecycle environmental impacts.

Mr. Rosenbloom, by the way, is a graphic artist and runs a small graphics arts business in Vermont, and his references were unlisted correspondence and an unnamed Swedish graduate student on a defunct discussion forum.

Verdict: WHOPPER

Wind Reality 7: Wind energy needs about 4% grid backup in penetrations up to 20% of generation, and that can come from hydro or other regions

The claim: Yes, and they are actually drawing that from the grid, but that is probably the minor part. What happens, because wind electricity or wind energy is so erratic, they need to be backed up in the grid by open cycle gas turbines which are running in spinning mode while wind electricity is being generated.

The data: This one falls apart in four different ways.

1. When required, gas turbines can be brought from cold to full power in under 10 minutes; and hydro in much shorter periods. Fossil fuel plants aren’t sitting their wasting gas backing up wind energy.

2. Grid management studies by professional organisations in the UK and Finland show that wind generation penetrations of up to 20% of the grid based on capacity factor would only require 4% backup on the grid. The amount of backup – which can be hydro or could be excess purchased from nearby jurisdictions – is a small portion of the capacity of wind generation.

3. Grid managers know something anti-wind advocates prefer to forget: that all forms of generation are intermittent and that failures of generation or transmission at major hydro and coal plants occur regularly and unpredictably. For example, a major coal plant in Australia was operating at 25% of its capacity
recently as the coal pit was flooded – again – by unseasonably high water level. Grids have to maintain capacity to adapt to instant losses of up to a gigawatt of generating capacity. The ‘spinning reserve’ (known as ‘Ancilliary Services’ in Australia) is sized to accomodate the potential loss of the single largest

4. Wind intermittency is very predictable, especially in Australia and Europe which have implemented the ANEMOS wind generation prediction models. They get 5 minute predictions at a 1-2% margin of error and 24 hour predictions at usually less than an 8% margin of error. Wind doesn’t fail and surprise anyone and
the levels of predictability are high. So while it is fair to say that wind energy is variable, it is highly predictable.

Verdict: WHOPPER

Wind Reality 8: Wind turbines don’t make people sick

The claim: But what we generally see in communities where wind farms start to operate is that a proportion of the population become affected by low frequency sounds and infra-sounds,and this affects them in numerous ways that mainly relate to headache, loss of balance, racing heart, high blood pressure, waking in fright in the middle of the night, waking up with nosebleeds, these sorts of things which generally make life very unpleasant for people who are living in the vicinity because they cannot escape it.

The data: 17 major health reviews have cleared wind turbines of any negative health impacts. They all agreed that some people living very close to wind turbines find the noise annoying. As dealing with environmental noise is a fact of life for rural and urban dwellers, its unclear why this is a significant concern. The list of symptoms and negative impacts of wind energy maintained by Simon Chapman has surpassed 125.

The claim of infrasound as a mechanism for sickness was posited by Dr. Nina Pierpont, author of the self-published, non-peer-reviewed book Wind Turbine Syndrome. (Dr Pierpont and her activist husband, Calvin Luther Martin, oppose a proposed wind farm in their ‘backyard’. See Martin’s rave here Dr. Pierpont’s methodology involved advertising on anti-wind websites for people who blamed their various ailments on wind turbines, interviewing by phone the 23 people in 10 families who responded, taking their reports on other family members symptoms and taking all of this at face value without additional medical followup.

Humans evolved with infrasound. Waves on a beach at 75 meters emit more infrasound than wind turbines. Running creates much louder infrasound inside the inner ear. Wind turbines emit too little infrasound to hear or feel, and far too little to cause harm. The very rare researchers claiming otherwise are not credible.

Verdict: WHOPPER

Wind Reality 9: A small subset of people very near to wind turbines find the noise annoying

The claim: And we have seen people with anything up to five kilometres away. Other people have claimed even further. But it is fairly well recorded that anything up to five kilometres away from wind turbines, people can be affected.

The data: There might be a geographical and meteorological quirk somewhere in the world every ten years that might allow someone to hear a wind turbine five kilometers way if they had really good hearing. Noise attenuation is by the cube of distance so wind turbines won’t be audible (infrasound does abate more slowly, but as it can’t be heard or felt next to wind turbines, it certainly isn’t detectable at five kilometers. Of course, Mr. Rheese is positively cautious compared to Sarah Laurie (an unregistered doctor and CEO of
the anti-wind Waubra Foundation) who regularly asserts harm at 14 kilometers, further than the distance from the Sydney Harbour Bridge to the Sydney Airport. Since the evidence presented is that wind turbine noise only makes some people who live near them annoyed, especially when they can see the wind turbine and aren’t making any money from it themselves, this one falls over.

Verdict: Whopper

Wind Reality 10: There are hundreds of research papers showing no health impacts from wind turbines

The claim: No, and that’s a very interesting thing, that currently there is not a single credible research paper in the peer-reviewed literature stating that chronic wind turbine noise is harmless to health.

The data: The slippery slope here is the word ‘credible’. As there are hundreds of research papers that show very clearly that there are no health impacts from wind turbines and 17 major reviews that assessed them and determined that there are no negative health impacts, the only possible assessment is that Mr. Rheese finds all of this evidence to not be credible because it does not agree with what he believes. Stephen Colbert coined the world ‘truthiness’ for this kind of thinking. Mr. Rheese instead prefers to rely on non-peer-reviewed research from Drs. Pierpont and Laurie, presumably.

Wind Reality 11: Governments are studying wind turbine health impacts

The claim: Yes, there is not a single government around the world that has yet had completed
scientific research to look at this problem.

The data: 16 of the 17 reviews were conducted by governmental agencies, for example the Public Health Officers of the Province of Ontario in Canada who have dealt with health concerns like the Walkerton e. Coli outbreak and the SARS epidemic, both of which killed people and permanently disabled others. They did what any organisation would do as a first step: they assembled the available literature and complaints to see if there were a credible basis for further investigation. They did assess Dr. Pierpont’s work as well as others. Unanimously, these governmental agencies agreed that there was no evidence for any health impacts outside of noise annoyance. Most of the peer-reviewed research papers that they assessed were funded by governmental grants as well.

Claiming that governments haven’t been investigating is obviously false, so what could Mr. Rheese mean? Obviously, that despite massive investigations and research, more research is needed until it says what he believes to be true. And of course, NHMRC in Australia is conducting another major review, after their earlier rapid review found no need for further study.

Verdict: WHOPPER

Wind Reality 12: Wind farms make property prices go up or have no impact

The claim: We would contest that and say there is evidence from around the world, and most of it, because of the recent nature…and this is, again, the same with the health issue, this is a very recent phenomena, particularly in Australia, we are only now becoming aware of it, but there is certainly a lot of anecdotal evidence to show that wind farms will have an effect on real estate values.

The data: There have been five major studies covering over 40,000 property transactions near wind turbines for periods before, during and after wind farm installation. The most credible two were by the UK Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors and the US Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Four of the five studies found no negative impacts of wind turbines on property values. Two of the studies found positive impacts on areas after wind turbines went in, which is logical as they bring with them jobs,
additional tax revenue hence increased amenities and a distinctive feature for the region compared to other regions.

One study found a brief dip prior to wind farms being erected due to fear of the wind farms impact, but this was rapidly corrected and home prices actually increased faster and higher after the wind farms went live. The outlier study had significant problems with its data and conclusions, and found what the author stated he expected to find. In fact, of the three counties he studied, the biggest one, with the most transactions, the most wind turbines and the longest history of wind energy had no property value impacts. For the two smallest counties with the fewest wind turbines he only had at most a year of property value information after the wind farms went into production, a major data quality issue.


In ignoring the major statistical studies that have been performed by highly credible organisations, Mr. Rheese is at best ignorant of what the data he claims to value shows. In using instead anecdotal information, he rests his arguments on nothing.

Verdict: WHOPPER

Wind Reality 13: People who support wind farms have science on their side

The claim: those supporting wind farms tended to based their submission on beliefs, they had no evidence or facts to support what they were saying in the broad sense based their submission or beliefs, they had no evidence or facts to support what they were saying.

The data: The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, referenced in the citations for three major studies associated with wind energy, have 13 Nobelists to their credit, as well as innumerable other scientific distinctions.

The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors referenced for their real-estate study is a long-lasting and very accomplished professional organisation with deep breadth and experience. The 16 health reviews by governmental organisations have been staffed with doctors, PhDs, epidemiologists, acousticians and engineers. Grid management professional studies by UK and Finland were written by PhDs an dengineers.

The list of qualified, deeply experienced, deeply educated and very professional people who have done studies and assessments of wind energy is virtually endless.

Anti-wind advocates live in an echo-chamber, where the unregistered former family doctor, Sarah Laurie, who has no training in medical research or statistics can repeat the methodology errors of Dr. Nina Pierpont, a pediatrician again with no training in research methodology or statistics. They quote approvingly people like Eric Rosenbloom, whose credentials stop at being a graphic artist and anti-wind advocate.

They eagerly accept deeply flawed studies showing lack of benefits of wind from fossil-fuel analysis companies like Bentek in the US, whose CEO runs two fossil fuel lobbying organisations. Their material is an endless set of links to each other’s websites, instead of to peer-reviewed, highly credible sources.

Verdict: Whopper


What is the Australian Environment Foundation? It sounds green

The AEF was established by the Institute of Public Affairs, “a conservative right wing think-tank”. Spokesperson  Kersten Gentle, is Vic Manager for Timber Communities Australia. Their aim is to ‘”secure long term access to natural resources to generate employment and a future for regional communities’.  Director Leon Ashby was Convenor of Landholders for the Environment and is a dairy farmer in SA. He has stated that the grazing of cattle in national parks is a viable option for bushfire prevention. Another Director, Tom Bostock, is a climate change sceptic. They recently promoted the launch of their spin-off climate change denialist organisation, the Australian Climate Science Coalition. “[AEF] is of the firm view that there is no evidence to support a significant link betweenCO2 emissions and GW.”

According to their lodged Annual Return, the AEF had only 109 members and turned over less than $25,000 in 2011 (ASIC). The Australian Conservation Foundation, which actually works to protect the environment, was known to have 39,845 members in the 2008 financial year and turns over approximately $14m annually (ACF website). Readers may be amused to note that the AEF is listed on the Federal Government’s Register of Environmental Organisations, meaning that, as a guardian of our
environment, you may donate to it tax free.
So who is Max Rheese anyway

In addition to his directorship of AEF, Max Rheese is also the Executive Director of the climate-change denialist group Australian Climate Science Coalition. Rheese was secretary of the Victorian Lands Alliance and apparently the only name associated with it. The VLA includes the Australian Environment Foundation, Australian Motorcycle Trailriders Association, Australian Trail Horseriders Association, Mountain Cattlemen, Sporting Shooters Association of Australia, Victorian Association of Forest Industries, and the Victorian Game and Deerstalking Association. He has regularly written articles attacking environmentally concerned organisations and actions.

*The transcript of the interview in question is here.


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  • John Brown

    Hi Mike,
    Great piece- thank you!
    Please ensure you send a copy- with your complements- to Max Rheese and his colleagues at the AEF.
    Perhaps he was just honestly uninformed- poor guy (insert sarcastic laugh!).
    Thanks for being so quick and helpful to pull together this piece, and thanks to Renew Econopmy for your onoing spotlight on such misinformation.
    John Brown

  • Chris Fraser

    RE Wind Reality 9: If it’s true there is a positive inverse correlation between the number of complaints about health impacts, noise and appearance of windfarms versus the distance from it – it follows then that hosts of turbines were somehow left out of the survey.

  • Bertie Moofer

    Thanks Mike. Great to have a voice of reason chime in. Keep up your great work!

  • Ben Courtice

    Regarding coal vs wind prices, in Australia part of the reason why windfarms are expensive is the cost of grid connection. Proposed windfarms are often strung along, or at least near, existing high voltage transmission lines. Of course when the coal power stations were moved out of cities, it was all done by government at government loan rates and there was no question of not getting grid connection…

  • Jd

    a blistering deconstruction of the edicts and mechanisms of the department of misinformation Mike! Thank you.

    I’d love to see you go head to head in a public debate with Mr Cheese from the Australian Envirowash Foundation

  • Mike Barnard

    Thanks all for the kind comments. I’m looking forward to doing more of these with different members of the rogue’s gallery. FYI, Max Rheese, according to ASIC filings, took an income of $22K from AEF and AusCSC over 2010 and 2011, while the organizations racked up $30K+ in overspending. Seems as if truth isn’t the only deficit they are running.

  • mijanko

    I see a significant difference between your stating “there are no health impacts” and doctors stating “The study did not find any conclusive of health impacts”.

    On one hand, we have some doctors saying they have not found proof that IWTs are a direct cause of health issues and some doctors recognize Turbine Syndrome.

    Doctors did not find “conclusive evidence” that smoking was linked to cancer.

    On the other hand, we have many real people who actually live/lived near IWTs screaming in tears about how IWTs ruined retirement paradises and caused them health issues.

    Keep looking doctors. Meanwhile data can be “spun” any way a person such as Mike likes.

    Farmers are being bought out with $1 million guaranteed of our tax dollars for each IWT they host!

    Don’t be fooled folks. Nearly every person who supports wind farms either hasn’t done their homework or benefits in some way financially.

    Can all these people be complaining for no good reason?

    Thank you.