Share this...



The Dutch province of North Holland has realised that windparks are a complete and useless eyesore that blight the landscape, and they save very little CO2. Therefore, the province has decided to forbid their construction. Hat-tip Science Skeptical here.

The North Holland region would seem to be ideally situated to take advantage of the windy North Sea. Indeed it would be difficult to find a more suitable spot for windmills. So if windparks there don’t make sense, what does that tells us about other places? Read here (in Dutch).

As a result, 20 planned windparks have been recently forbidden. Only a single planned token windpark in the Wieringermeer may be built.

The senselessness of the wild construction of weather-dependent windparks is revealed by a Dutch study here. Science Skeptical writes that experts “found out that the real fuel savings, and thus the reduction in CO2 output, is a whole 1.6% of the windpark’s rated capacity.”

Adding it all up, one must conclude that under the present conditions in the Netherlands a 100 MW (Megawatt) ‘name plate’ capacity wind development produces on average 23 MW because of the capacity factor. 4,6 MW (20%) of this has to be subtracted from the final net result because of initial energy investments. From the actual Statline production figures we know that 27% of this 23 MW = 6,17 MW represents the actual fossil fuel and CO 2 savings. But from this figure we need to subtract the amount of energy invested in the construction works: 4,6 MW. The net total of fuel saving electricity provided by our wind turbines therefore is 6.17 – 4.6 = 1.57 MW on average over the year. That is ~ 1.6% of the installed capacity. It makes wind developments a mega money pit with virtually no merit in terms of the intended goal of CO 2 emission reduction or fossil fuel saving.

This conclusion needs to be made known to anyone thinking about installing a windpark.

Are you listening, Renewables Guy?