The excel spreadsheet on Danish windmills is not a secret, and anyone who wishes to examine the internationally famous Danish wind energy program can pull it up at any time on the English language pages of the website.

Danish Energy Agency Wind Turbine Page.

I am going to access and process data on Excel document to which a link is Wind turbine master data as at end of November 2008 (data from 19 December 2008)

If you are already familiar with Microsoft Excel calculations, bear with me. Note that there are two tabs (on the bottom) for spreadsheets, existing and decommissioned, named in both Danish and English and note that the spreadsheets are extremely detailed, giving the geographical location, installation date, manufacturer of every Danish windmill. Note also that both the installation and decommissioning dates on the second sheet are also present. Microsoft Excel provides a YEAR function that converts numerical date strings into integer years that can be used in numerical calculations.

I have used this function to extract the lifetime for every decommissioned windmill, all 1,927 of them.

I have then used this data and the Excel MEAN function - not to be mean but to make a serious point - to determine what the mean lifetime of decomissioned Danish windmills is. It is 15.9 years, carrying one insignificant figure, or 15 years and 10 months.

I have used the MEDIAN function to determine that half of the windmills lasted less than 16 years and that half lasted more than 16 years.

I have used the MAX function to determine that the longest surviving windmill lasted for 28 years.

There was only ONE windmill that lasted 28 years, the 22 kW unit manufactured by Kongsted described on Row 188 of the spreadsheet for decommissioned units.

Now.

I have little patience for the vicious little insulting cretins who come into my diaries to insist - attempting in a sleight of hand to appropriate a measure of moral superiority for their own, usually ignorant and uninformed opinions on energy - to insist that the only reason that I write my diaries is because I am a "shill" paid by the nuclear industry. These same people often complain that I am vicious, and of course I am, because it occurs to me that much of the world's existing nuclear infrastructure has been deliberately destroyed by viciousness and agression.

I have a theory about why these people assume that I must be paid to spend so much time doing what I do here. The theory runs like this: Most anti-nukes are consumers, like the ignorant anti-nukes Sting (the musician), and Amory Lovins (fossil fuel/Car CULTure corporate shill) and often they are paid sometimes highly paid to produce their ignorance. (This certainly applies to Lovins.) Similarly, most people are hypocrites - and I fit in to this category since I drive a car and abhor the car CULTure - and like to pretend that they are free of culpability for dire circumstances and that the fault for the disaster now facing our planet lies with everyone else. Somehow they imagine that they need not face the fact that their cars are powered by dangerous fossil fuels if they can pretend that (if they win the lottery or get rich from writing famous books about "green stuff" or by becoming solar energy tycoons) they will buy a Tesla electric sportscar some day and put solar cells on their McMansion roof.

As consumers, as people driven largely by material concerns, material wealth, money, access to money and stuff these people who impugn my motives are preternaturally unequipped to understand that people are sometimes driven not by greed, not by financial reward but by ethical considerations, i.e., the desire to do the right and moral thing.

That's my theory for what it's worth and I confess, it only occurred to me recently.

To me, our greatest responsibility is not to acquire the maximal number of toys before we die, but to extend human vision in space and time because, bitter old atheist that I am, I actually believe that maybe the universe in fact has a meaning, and that meaning is seeing itself.

Thus the instruments of time are our children, our grandchildren, our great grandchildren.

We leave our children many things, our ignorance as well as our insight, our stupidity, as well as our wisdom, our soaring cathedrals (of all types) and our holes filled with waste, destroyed species, destroyed habitats, so on.

Nobody ever questions a wind energy advocate about his or her motivations, or a solar energy advocate about his or her motivations, even though it is clear that many such people write here at Kos and get applause and praise for applauding and praising wind and solar energy, even while openly stating that they have such interest. It is an article of faith but not, in my view, of reason that these things and the people who extol them cannot be questioned, that wind and solar are always good and great and wonderful and desirable and that they represent the best course to stave off disaster.

I don't happen to believe that either wind or solar are as dangerous as the best of the terrible dangerous fossil fuels, natural gas.

But I note that the Danes, while cloaking themselves in renewable holiness of the type that I have come to loathe, are major exporters of dangerous fossil fuels in Europe and that, while doing this, they worked to incite the destruction of the Barseback unit 2 nuclear reactor, although it functioned well and was doing more to fight climate change than 1000 "cool" windmills.

We are about to hand future generations a tremendous amount of indebtedness, not of the happy kind, debts we incurred to maintain our orgiastic excess.

I think it is great that our fine President-elect has committed to building infrastructure - because this infrastructure is a gift to generations we have only saddled with the terrible consequences of our self-absorbed desire to maintain our car CULTure suburban lives.

Thus it matters what the life time and utility of that infrastructure is. Sixteen years does not qualify.

Here in New Jersey, we have the Oyster Creek Nuclear reactor, which came on line in 1969 and operates perfectly well. This reactor was a gift from my father's generation to mine.

Angry, vicious, malicious and ill informed people are trying to vandalize and destroy this New Jersey nuclear infracture that has already lasted and served for longer than any windmill in Denmark and could serve for decades to come with proper maintainence.

Someone has to say it, and it might as well be me. I personally don't give a fuck about what anyone thinks of my motivations, because frankly, this is not a cute game. This is for real. The abyss is before us. We cannot afford to demonize and destroy that which works. The answer is not - no matter how many yuppie argue otherwise - "all new stuff."

The single biggest thing that can be done in this state to fight climate change for a long time to come, by far, is to save that reactor, which accrued the vast majority of its external costs while Lyndon Johnson was still President.