ON Monday, all the wind farms in Southern Australia, all the hundreds of turbines scattered across South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania, altogether produced exactly zero — nothing, nada, zip, zilch — power for two hours smack in the middle of the day.

Indeed, right through most of the working day — from 11am in the morning until after 8pm that night — the total output of all the wind farms was effectively zero for that entire period.

All those turbines (sic) have an aggregate capacity (sic) of nearly 3000MW — that’s theoretically equal to two large coal-fired power stations.

But over those nine hours they pumped out at most just 120MW, barely 4 per cent of their capacity (sic), and for most of the time much less even than that.

That included those two hours, from 3pm to 5pm, of absolutely no power. So, if we had embraced the Green fantasy of total so-called “renewable energy”, the lights — and everything else from hospital power to factories — would just have had to go off. Bad luck if you are in an operating theatre.

I am indebted to Andrew Miskelly and his excellent windfarmperformance.info website, which tracks their output at five minute intervals over the 24 hours every day, with data from AEMO, the Australian Energy Market Operator.

Once again, I’m reminding you of the basic reality of so-called wind power (sic) that all the assorted Green fetishists and fantasists like Tristan Edis of our Business Spectator don’t want to admit or even recognise. When the wind don’t blow, the power don’t flow.

Further, this data destroys the other great claim of these fetishists and fantasists — and the main-chancers happy to pocket the dollars from our mandatory RET (Renewable Energy Target).

This is the argument presented to counter the reality of that basic uselessness: that the wind must be blowing somewhere. So, if you spread the wind farms across enough of Australia, at least some turbines (sic) will be turning somewhere.

Well, these wind farms are scattered from as far west as Port Lincoln to east of Canberra, from the top of Tasmania to way north of Adelaide, from coastal sites to tops of country hills, and from all of them, for those two hours not a single MW of power.

In very simple but powerfully important terms, you could build ten times as many wind farms; have a theoretical capacity to produce 30,000MW of power — enough to supply all the power requirements of south eastern Australia — and when you got a repeat of Monday, as you will; you will still get zero power.

Now the only time you are likely to read about this uselessness from those Green fetishists and fantasists is when they are rationalising it away.

This is what we saw with Edis some weeks ago when he claimed that an analysis showed you could predict these sorts of “outages” an hour ahead of time (he originally claimed 24 hours, but corrected that); time enough to power up an alternative.

That someone can even write that without understanding the total ludicrousness of what they are suggesting is mind-boggling. That you’ve got to keep real power stations operating, so they can plug the gap when wind fails.

A parallel example would be owning a car that you knew would just stop every now and then and not go for an hour or two or four. But that’s OK because you’ve got another one, a normal one, ready to take its place, idling in the garage.

A normal person who doesn’t live in some Green fantasy would say; we’ll just dump the first one and stick with the one that actually works.

In the case of power stations, that is the coal-fired one which pumps out pure life-enhancing carbon dioxide plant food. Not the dirty bits of grit that those using the totally false term ‘carbon pollution’ are trying to suggest.

More ludicrously still, we saw this week another leading Green fantasist Mark Diesendorf claiming — and faithfully relayed by Edis — that by mixing and matching various forms of renewable power, you could get a reliable system built around 46 per cent coming from wind.

Earth to Diesendorf and Edis et al: Bullshit. If and when 46 per cent of “your” power grid went to zero, there is no way in the world that various forms of solar and a little bit of hydro and gas turbine could suddenly double their output. Even with an hour’s notice.

Sorry, my apologies; in your fantasy world, with your fantasy grid, of course it is possible.

This takes on huge importance in the coming effort by the Abbott government to get (half) rational about the 20 per cent mandatory RET. BY seeking to have it set at 20 per cent of actual power output in 2020, not the fixed MW figure we have now, courtesy of the previous Labor government.

Businessman Dick Warburton, a rationalist not a fantasist, is overseeing a review of the RET. He will certainly recommend it be set no higher than a real 20 per cent; he could more sensibly recommend it be abandoned entirely as a useless waste of billions of dollars of your money.

Right now the grid can just handle the sort of disruption reflected in the wind not blowing, as total “real” renewable power (sic), which is almost all wind — excluding of course, the hated river-destroying hydro — renewable power (sic) adds to just 4-5 per cent of the total.

But if it went to the 15 per cent required by the 20 per cent RET (with hydro contributing 5 per cent or so) we would face increased cost and blackouts.

It’ll be up to Clive and his PUPpets to see sanity.