Before the public get too excited, they should know what Sir David MacKay, ex-chief scientific advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, said recently about renewable energy during his final interview before his sad and untimely death.

He stated that there is an “appalling delusion” about the potential for renewables to power the UK, which is “dangerous“. When asked how much wind and solar power the UK should have he replied “almost zero”.

Geoffe Moore comments in a letter today on the new SNP draft Climate Change bill….very scary stuff and the question is, do our elected members read it before voting?

This article reiterates this

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/28/collective-act-make-believe-devastating-environment-budgets/

By Christopher Booker

Wind farms produce electricity eratically Credit: Yves herman/Reuters

The oddest thing about the political crisis gripping Northern Ireland was what triggered it. In 2012, under an EU ruling that burning wood was “carbon neutral”, the Northern Irish government, led by Arlene Foster and Martin McGuinness, adopted a “green” scheme introduced by the UK the previous year, the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI), offering lavish subsidies to businesses to use wood chips to heat their premises.

RHI was launched in Belfast without any control over how the money was spent. When businesses discovered that they could be paid £160 for every £100 they spent on wood, so many signed up, even using it to heat empty buildings, that, by 2020, it was estimated, the bill to UK taxpayers could have risen to £1 billion.

But this is only one of the countless unforeseen consequences of that obsession which has long held our politicians in its grip: the belief that, to “save the planet”, we must replace the fossil fuels on which our entire way of life rests with new sources of supposedly “carbon-free” renewable energy.

Arlene Foster is at the centre of the RHI scandal Credit: Liam Burney/PA Wire

We are committed to spending almost unlimited sums on subsidising ways we can tap into “clean, green” energy. Yet scarcely a week goes by without one of these schemes being revealed to be making a mockery of the purpose for which they were set up.

Each new example is shocking enough. But when we put them all together we see just how far this relentless drive to “decarbonise” is based on a colossal act of collective make-believe. Here are some examples.

1) The “Renewable Heat” Fiasco

Northern Ireland is only the most publicised instance of the absurdities created by the Renewable Heat Incentive. When in 2014 the Government extended this scheme to domestic premises, many owners of large houses across Britain realised that the more they kept their boilers running, even in summer, the more profit from the taxpayer-funded subsidy they could make. Since 2013 our bill for all this has been soaring so fast that, within four years, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, it will have totalled nearly £5 billion.

One consequence is that Britain is now burning more wood than at any time since the industrial revolution (hence inter ala last week’s first-ever ”Very High Pollution Alert” in London). Just as disturbing have been revelations of where much of the fuel to feed this subsidy bonanza comes from. Alarming pictures have shown the appalling damage being done to some of our most treasured ancient woodlands, even including a Cheshire estate owned by the National Trust.

Burning wood for heat is an ancient practice Credit: Pierre Edouard Frere/www.bridgemanart.com

2) The “Biomass” Farce

On a much grander scale is the sad story of Drax in Yorkshire: until recently the largest, cleanest and most modern coal-fired power station in Europe, supplying 8 per cent of Britain’s electricity. When in 2010 fossil-fuel power stations began to be squeezed by George Osborne’s “carbon tax”, intended to make them increasingly uneconomical, Drax decided to spend £700 million on converting its giant boilers to “biomass”, burning wood. For the three already converted, instead of being “carbon-taxed”, Drax now receives a whopping subsidy under the “renewable obligation” worth nearly £500 million a year.

But what has made this really shocking is that most of the 7.5 million tons of wood Drax uses each year is being shipped from the south-eastern states of America, where 4,600 square miles of forest are annually being felled, to be turned into wood pellets for burning 4,000 miles away in Yorkshire. Scientific studies have shown not just that much of this is virgin forest, uniquely rich in wildlife, but that, far from saving CO2, the whole process, including production and transporting of the pellets, has been estimated to result in emissions actually much higher than if Drax was still only burning coal.

3) The “waste into gas” threat

More controversy has lately been spiralling around another subsidy bonanza, again under the RHI and costing taxpayers £216 million a year. Developers have rushed to build nearly 100 giant “anaerobic digesters”: massive industrial plants in the countryside, designed to supply methane to the national gas grid made from food waste and crops such as maize, now specially grown on hundreds of thousands of acres formerly producing food to eat.

A particular concern for those living near these unsightly operations is not just their smell and the thousands of vehicle movements needed to bring in their fuel, but the growing list of pollution incidents from leaks of toxic ammonia, killing farm animals and wildlife. Investigations are currently underway into whether a spillage which killed more than 1,000 fish in one of Britain’s best-loved salmon and trout rivers, the Teifi, came from one such site.

4) Tidal fantasies

Many have long dreamed of harnessing the energy of the sea to produce electricity. Recently yet another such project collapsed, with a giant wave-powered turbine on the Welsh sea-bed, costing £18 million (£8 million of it from the EU), having broken down after just three months of operation.

Far more ambitious is the proposal to invest £40 billion in the world’s first huge “tidal lagoons”, first in Swansea Bay, with five others to follow. But, as I wrote two weeks ago, the derisory amount of power these might produce, paid for by mind-boggling subsidies, should make this a pipe-dream.

An artists impression of part of the Swansea tidal lagoon Credit: PA

5) When the wind doesn’t blow

Of the £52 billion Britain has invested in “renewables” since 2010, by far the largest chunk has gone into wind and solar farms, which, for a subsidy of more than £5 billion a year, now produce 14 per cent of the UK’s electricity, But the penny has now widely dropped that when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, these are not only useless, but require immediate and very expensive back-up from gas-fired power stations (and even thousands of diesel generators), to keep our lights on.

Even more absurd is how, when there is “too much wind”, to prevent this destabilising the grid we must pay £90 million more a year in “constraint payments”, to compensate their owners for not sending electricity into the grid.– pay ing them very handsomely to do nothing.

6) The electric car debacle

Although we have now paid more than £50 million to bribe motorists into buying “green” all-electric cars, barely 50,000 have been sold, at £25,000 or more each. This represents just 0.0091 per cent of the cars on Britain’s roads.

Carefully hidden, of course, is that most of the power used to charge their batteries comes from fossil fuels. So, when the manufacturing process and transmission losses to charging points are added in, these vehicles emit significantly more CO2 than they supposedly save, Yet MPs last July nodded through the “Fifth Carbon Budget”, imagining that within 13 years 60 per cent of all our cars will be electric.

Tesla’s Model X is an electric car Credit: James Lipman

Endless more examples could be cited, such as the environmental catastrophe inflicted on tropical countries by replacing vast areas of virgin rainforest with palm oil plantations, fuelled at least in part by the need to meet the EU’s legal requirement for us to use “biofuels”, which again have been shown to generate more CO2 in their production than they save.

Nor should we forget the “Diesel-gate” scandal which followed from the EU’s drive to reduce CO2 and other polluting emissions by engineering a switch from petrol to supposedly “greener” diesel-powered cars. Only in 2015 did it emerge that Volkswagen and other European car makers had been systematically cheating on their emissions tests.

It is time we woke up to the fact that all this nonsense represents one of the most bizarre collective flights from reality in history. But so long as the Climate Change Act is in force, we remain firmly in its grip.

Link to the letter and translations on EPAW site

Dear decision-makers, politicians, Members of the EU Parliament, EU-Commission and other responsible public officials,          

1. 29th April, 2015 is the 20th anniversary of International Noise Awareness Day, so we would like to warn you about the dangers of wind turbine infrasound and low frequency noise (ILFN) which have been largely and intentionally ignored by the global wind industry, politicians and even health authorities. Worldwide the wind industry has been trying to force their wind turbines (WT) as close to people’s homes as possible, for the sake of profit but at the expense of the health of the local residents, by deliberately ignoring the known sleep disturbance and serious health problems caused directly by impulsive wind turbine ILFN.  Government authorities have been complicit in ignoring the existing scientific evidence, and the harm.       
2. We therefore request you do your own due diligence on this issue, and investigate for yourself.  There is an abundance of acoustic, scientific and clinical information independent of wind industry influence at websites such as epaw.org; na-paw.org; waubrafoundation.org.au and scientific evidence found there, and books as Wind Turbine Syndrome by a medical doctor Dr. Nina Pierpont, MD PhD, 2009 (see also: windturbinesyndrome.com) and The Wind Farm Scam by a Reader in Ecology at the University of Wales Dr. John Etherington, 2009). 
3. The facts are that wind turbine noise: audible (low frequency noise LFN – under 200 Hz) and inaudible, but sensed very much (infrasound– under 20 Hz) results in serious adverse health effects, and is extremely dangerous to human health.  Direct causation of symptoms and sensations from wind turbine generated impulsive infrasound and low frequency noise was established by US scientist Dr Neil Kelley in the 1980’s.  More recently Steven Cooper’s work in Australia at Cape Bridgewater for wind developer Pacific Hydro has confirmed many aspects of Kelley’s research thirty years earlier.
4. The lifetime span of wind-turbines is from 20 up to 25 years and there are another 25 years to be expected with new turbines at the same place, therefore there is no escape from them for people in their lifetime. People are mostly exposed to pulsating infrasound. These pulses arise as the wind turbine blades pass the pillar.
5. Therefore we firmly demand that you, as one of the decision-makers:  

5.1.  Start considering the scientific evidence on the dangers of wind turbine noise, which go back as far as 30 years (NASA study, others and a historical overview on the wind turbine noise). These studies have shown that especially infrasound penetrates through closed windows and walls, and even resonates and amplifies within rooms to cause even stronger effects (cdn.knightlab.com ),

5.2.   Stop ignoring so many people all over the world crying for help and even leaving their homes due to the wind turbine noise (for example: epaw.org; na-paw.org ),      

5.3.   Recognize that wind farms are one of the worst night time noise pollutants of today and that prolonged sleep deprivation is also considered to be a method of torture by the ‘’The UN Committee against Torture (CAT),           

5.4.   Recognize what the wind industry does not want the general public and responsible public officials to learn, that there is much evidence on infra- and LFN wind turbine noise including the facts that:

– More megawatts produced by more powerful wind turbines means a greater proportion of infrasound and low frequency noise is generated,

– Infrasound is known to travel very, very long distances,

– Noise-pollution by wind power developments with many wind turbines is much, much stronger than one with only wind turbine, although serious health damage can occur from just one wind turbine if it is too close to homes and workplaces,

– Infrasound from wind turbines on hills will travel greater distances,

– Stronger winds, higher air moisture, lower background noise in rural areas, temperature inversion, etc., can mean greater adverse impacts from relatively higher levels of infra- and LFN noise pollution,

– No current models exist which accurately predict real wind farm infrasound and low frequency noise pollution,

– Children, older people, pregnant women are especially sensitive and threatened,

– Safe setback distances for different sized wind turbines in different terrain have NOT yet been established and demonstrated to protect the surrounding population.

– Change the current noise measurements to full spectrum measurement inside homes and recognize that A-Weighted Sound Level (dBA) is inappropriate and unsafe because it does not include low-frequency noise and infrasound,

– Stop the use of dBA for wind turbine noise assessments immediately,

–  Stop the wind power subsidies immediately.

We look forward to hearing from you soon. Thank you in advance.
 

    Yours faithfully, 


Jean -Louis Butré 
 European Platform Against Wind Farms (EPAW)
President
3 rue des eaux Paris 75016 France
contact@epaw.org
http://www.epaw.org
+33 6 80 99 38 08

Sherri Lange  
North American Platform Against Wind Power (NA-PAW, USA-Canada)
CEO  
416-567-5115
kodaisl@rogers.com
www.na-paw.org

Sarah Laurie  WAUBRA FOUNDATION
BMBS CEO PO
Box 7112 Banyule VIC 3084 AUSTRALIA
+61 474 050 463
sarah@waubrafoundation.org.au
www.waubrafoundation.org.au/

(*) last week end FED  sent  personal letters to all our deputies   to protest against the vote of the  “Brottes law”   reducing distance of protection at 500m
The deputie François BROTTES (working for promotors)  received  thousands of mails and letters of protest from all parts of France …..and it is not the end….

THE UK and the Scottish Governments are taking action to seek to reduce CO2 emissions and to reduce dependency on fossil fuel. The main strategy to achieve these goals is to substitute energy from fossil fuel with energy from renewable sources. The problem with the way that this strategy is being implemented is that the technical difficulties, the potential economic outcomes and the degree to which the goals can be achieved are not being reliably addressed.

For example, wind is being used as the main source of renewable energy for the transformation, but it cannot be relied on to deliver.

If there were ten gigawatts (GW) of installed wind capacity in Scotland, at any given time there would be only about an evens chance of having 2.5 GW or more of this capacity being generated. The most likely levels of wind generation would be less than 2.5GW. This is the opposite of what is needed. For a secure system the most likely levels of generation needs to be at the high end of the range, eg at 8GW.

If we relied only on wind power, we would have to expect the lights not to go on when you flicked the switch. If this were the case we would not be able to support an industrial society. The only feasible technical solution to this problem is to maintain a fleet of thermal generators (coal, gas, nuclear) that, along with hydro, can provide a reliable output. Wind capacity in the system has to be effectively mirrored by thermal capacity.

It is obvious that this pushes up the cost of electricity. Even without this extra “integration cost”, the cost of wind energy is higher than from other sources. If it were not, it would not need to be subsidised. Extra transmission costs also need to be taken into account. The cost of wind energy cannot go down as the amount in the system increases. It can only go up.

The negative effect of renewable energy on the risk that supply will not meet demand has to be considered on a system basis. Reliable technology exists that can be used to keep this risk at an acceptable level. But in order to do this, a central authority is needed to do the calculations and take action to ensure that the necessary generation capacity is made available. Market forces cannot be relied on to deliver a secure supply of electricity. A response to this is: “The problems we have are due to government intervention in the market. Is central authority not the problem rather than the solution?”

Some people believe that an enterprise that operates in the market will always be more successful than one run by a government. Reality is not as simple as that. Markets work much to the advantage of customers – or not. For example, the privatisation of air travel in the 1980s has resulted in a market that allows a wide choice of routes and fares making flying much more affordable. On the other hand competition among banks has not served the nation well in recent years. Government bodies can be highly successful – or not. For example, Scottish Water is a government body that performs very successfully in comparison with private water companies. But the nationalisation of shipbuilding in 1977 was a disaster.

What makes the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful government organisation? Crucial factors are (a) the competence of those who manage the enterprise and (b) the degree to which politicians allow them to get on with their business. Government enterprises tend to become less successful when politicians make decisions to satisfy demands of a sector of the electorate in order to gain votes.

That they do take action on what voters want is entirely appropriate but what some voters want may not be in the best interests of the populace. For electricity generation we have very good evidence that a central authority is both essential and can work well. The 1926 UK Electricity Act created a competent national body the actions of which very successfully modernised the electricity system that was a combination of private and municipal ownership. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation imposes strict standards for security of supply over the whole of the US and Canada. The need for this body was prompted by serious failures in supply.

Two options are: Wait until blackouts show the system is not fit for purpose, then set up a commission to investigate the reasons for the failures and struggle to prevent further lapses or: Set up a commission to fix it now and avoid the problems. Which option would you choose?

• Professor Iain A MacLeod represents Scientific Alliance Scotland

Please find An Open Letter  to DECC   plus three of the attachments referred to in the letter.

This open letter is in response to this:  Wind Power.rtf response from DECC 31-10-14 DECC letter of 31st October

which in turn is a reply to this open letter 

I should like to draw your particular attention to the attached important recent submission by Pat Swords BE CEng FIChemE CEnv MIEMA, to the  Northern Ireland Assembly Environment Committee, in which the following observations are made (my emphasis).

“Elections are only a ‘roll call’ to select public representatives and not put ‘rulers’ into place with unlimited powers by diktat. The environment of the UK does not belong to administrators of the UK or of the EU to do what they want with it, such as filling it with wind turbines and pylons. Instead, the environment of the UK belongs to its people and they have defined rights in law, which must be respected. History teaches us that populist trends and fashions come and go; as a result that is why a defined legal structure and associated rights have been put in place. This legal structure and associated rights are there for a reason, as part of the necessary checks and balances.

 So let’s look at those rights and the legal structure, which was put in place to control such matters.  Principle 10 of the United Nations Rio Declaration of 1992 spelt it out: http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=78&ArticleID=1163

•  Environmental issues are best handled with participation of all concerned citizens, at the relevant level. At the national level, each individual shall have appropriate access to information concerning the environment that is held by public authorities, including information on hazardous materials and activities in their communities, and the opportunity to participate in decision-making processes. States shall facilitate and encourage public awareness and participation by making information widely available. Effective access to judicial and administrative proceedings, including redress and remedy, shall be provided.”

These statement truly reflect why the detailed nature of the attached response was and remains, necessary.

I should be grateful for confirmation of receipt of this email and the four attachments.

Yours sincerely,

Mrs. V.C.K. Metcalfe.

referral of wind turbines under market surveillance-1-1

This email and open letter was also sent for the attention of Nicola Sturgeon 

Dear First Minister,

This open letter has been sent to DECC asking why UK policy on windfarms is by-passing legal directives and ignoring negative environmental impacts.

Perhaps your new administration will enable you to take a fresh look at the damage caused by the current windfarm policy.

Watch the presentation given by Pat Swords to the Stormont Energy assembly in Belfast here:

It is a valuable source of understanding all this information.

On behalf of Christine Metcalfe, I should be grateful for an acknowledgment of receipt of this letter and your minister’s answers to the FOI questions under Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs).

Kind regards

Susan Crosthwaite www.windsofjustice.org.uk

I was angered by the deceitful figures released by those who promote the renewables industry on the TV news and in various newspapers at the end of last week. I beg that the reader take these figures with a pinch of salt because power from wind and water is as variable as the weather so such figures should never be looked at in isolation, only as part of the big picture or a calculation of long-term averages. These people are either being deceitful or need to study basic statistical analysis; I suspect the former.

Firstly, they say that wind output rose by 20% when one period this year is compared to the same period last year. This is just cherry-picking; did they announce in the summer that wind output FELL by 52% despite 3% more turbines being operational when comparing the second quarter of this year with the first?

Secondly, they say that hydro output rose by 50%. I will now show the truth here. In 2009 UK hydro output was 5240 GWh (gigawatt hours), it had an all-time record fall to 3575 GWh in 2010 due to low rainfall, then rose back to 5690 GWh in 2011 (in other words by 59%). But this rise is indicative of a bad situation (that so much output was lost the year before), not a good one. This is a similar situation to what happened with the hydro figure released last week. I wonder was there a press release in 2012 saying that “Hydro output rose by 59%”.

I know it is hard to believe, but UK hydro output has had no upward trend since 2002 despite 500 new hydro schemes, costing hundreds of millions and paid for from your bills. This is due to new legislation that year giving new subsides which had the effect of hydro schemes being optimised for cash flow at the expense of  focusing on electrical generation. My data can be checked on the DECC statistics website.

Yours,

On 4 November 2014 I phoned a certain office bearer at RenewableUK to get a response to an email which I’d sent but he’d ignored. It wasn’t an anti-wind farm email per se, it was to ask why they weren’t campaigning for more schemes in the SE of England, so they could share the “benefits”. He apologised and requested that I send it again so he could look at it. I said there was no need as it was short and simple. I explained I had irrefutable and corroborating evidence that far from building the majority of schemes in Scotland, they should be going into the Home Counties, where they would perform as well as Scottish schemes, with the additional benefits of fewer grid upgrades and transmission losses.  And from the Midlands south they use 62% of the electricity. But with his lie after lie I wasn’t going to say nothing and accept them. This person is Bad with a capital B. Other disputes I’ve had at wind farm expos were nothing compared to this; he kept interrupting with his rehearsed pre-scripted responses and clichés; perhaps by the end he feared I was setting him up and recording it. It started cordially enough. I paraphrase. The parts where I’m speaking are in italics.

Each scheme is judged on it’s own merits. Your scheme in the South East was obviously in a place with a good wind resource. Others were rejected because eg. they were on a bird migration route.

Scotland has wildlife too, this doesn’t explain why there are maybe 100 schemes in Scotland but just 1 in the SE of England.

Each scheme is judged on it’s own merits. The Scottish Hills have good wind resources. The Tories say that if they get in power they’re going to ban onshore turbines.

Conspiracy theorists would say it’s because rich and influential people who work in London and commute from their Surrey villas don’t want these things blighting their lives.

You’re being cynical now. We’re pushing for a big expansion in the UK supply chain including UK turbine factories.

And by 2020 all the schemes in the north of Scotland will necessitate huge constraint because of slow grid upgrade.

This obviously isn’t ideal; we want to utilise every bit of energy. The grid used to be upgraded first but this meant connecting to nothing so it was changed to build wind farms first and the grid will catch up.

The grid will never catch up if they don’t stop building schemes.

We’re starting to put more and more offshore.

Offshore schemes get constraint too. Talking of offshore I just read about E Anglia One and it’s 5 extensions totalling 7200MW. If it were to be generating say 2000MW and the wind died, as I’ve experienced, it would be like 2 major gas plants coming offline.

Wind increases grid stability.

No it doesn’t.

Yes it does.

Let’s move on!

Didcot B caught fire the other week and went offline. National Grid assure us that their forecasts are accurate and that they have contingencies in place.

National Grid are not being honest because they’re scared of losing their jobs and pensions.

You’re being cynical.

Gas is different; major plants tripping out is quite rare and it’s been happening for decades and the Grid are well used to dealing with it. Wind is totally different as by 2020 you could have up to 29GW coming offline over hours across the UK. The whole gas fleet never goes all at the same time but it could happen with Wind over hours. And National Grid launched a document last week stating that that the margin this winter at peak consumption is only 4.1% which is about 3GW, dropping to half of that next winter.

But there’d be wind somewhere across the UK.

Not true, do you remember that 3 week low wind event across the UK in early September?

I’m not aware of it.

7,700 MW of metered wind fell as low as 109 MW at it’s lowest point which is about 1% of capacity and averaged only 633 MW for 3 weeks.

Those figures are not true. The UK Wind fleet does not drop to 1%. I don’t recognise that figure.

Check it yourself; you can download the last 3 months data for all power technologies from BMRS which is used by National Grid, and you’re telling me that you rely on National Grid so it must be true.

I don’t recognise that figure.

The main problem with Wind is that often there’s too little and often there’s too much. Your side are claiming that there are storage solutions to solve this. Have you heard of Cruachan pumped storage scheme?

No.

Cruachan can store about 10 GWh. How many Cruachans do you think it would require to fill in the gap left by Wind if we had only 5% of capacity on average generated from Wind over 3 weeks with 29 GW of Wind total capacity in a future 2020 scenario with all schemes in planning and consented that are likely to become operational?

I’m not going to answer that. We have a portfolio of renewable technologies which will fill the gap; like hydro and tidal.

Hydro provides just 1.5% of UK generation; tidal is years away from any significant deployment and provides nothing 4 times a day; there’s no way these can fill in for vast quantities of Wind energy going missing. Just guess a ball-park figure.

I’m not making a guess.

The answer is about 180. But your side never mention how you’d recharge these storage units afterwards as presumably the existing Wind fleet would be powering people’s homes and factories. And in addition to the subsides we’re paying for generating renewables, we’d need to pay an extra one to store the energy.

Never say never. We’re developing a range of storage technologies. I think batteries are the way ahead but there are others like conversion to hydrogen. There’s a game-changer coming.

Presumably pumped storage is the one which is most proposed because it’s the cheapest and most practicable one. The other main one, conversion to hydrogen, was invented decades ago. There’s a reason it’s never been deployed on a UK scale; it’s too expensive and has major problems in utilisation. Electrolysis plants are very expensive and only make sense if they’re running all the time, not waiting for an excess of Wind. Mass storage for Wind is unworkable, unaffordable. The cost would result in poorer people basically unable to afford electricity. Even if it were affordable, the supply chain could never deliver it; there aren’t enough engineers or rare earth metals etc, especially if it was tried globally.

Fossil fuel’s going to run out some time so we might as well start now.

I don’t get any of my data from anti-wind farm web sites; it all comes from your side of the fence.[here his tone changed]

Are you from an anti-wind farm organisation?

No, I’m a truth campaigner.

A “truth campaigner”. I don’t like where this conversation is going. I want this phone conversation to end now. You’re being aggressive.

I had 4 letters in the press in the last 2 months.

I don’t like the tone of this conversation; a minute ago you asked me if I’d heard of Alex Salmond [he hadn’t heard of SSE or Cruachan]. I want this to end.

OK we’ll finish there. Thanks for your time.

Cape Bridgewater Resident Melissa Ware has sent this Open Letter to the following recipients:

Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Minister Greg Hunt, Minister Ian Macfarlane, Senator John Madigan, Senator Nick Xenophon, Senator Chris Back, Dan Tehan, MP, Premier Denis Napthine,

Subject: Open Letter on Wind Farms & The Renewable Energy Target. August 2014

To all concerned, 

Attached is a letter offering insight into negative impacts of the RET on our small community at Cape Bridgewater. Impacts directly caused by the presence of renewable energy production in the form of wind turbines and how those impacts then reverberate to the wider community. 

Sincerely,
Melissa Ware

One hundred days until Victoria’s election. I write opposing a RET supporting the growth of wind turbines and adverse renewable energy industry impacts on Australians and rural communities. I ask how you support the needs of isolated rural families like mine coping with illness, coping with inadequate protection and inadequate response to harmful impacts of wind turbines on our lives. Ware-M.-Open-letter-on-The-Renewable-Energy-Target-Aug-2014

Sunday Express August 24^th, 2014

Scottish Letter of the Week

Investigate Turbine Sickness Now

Generating electricity creates noise, but the traditional nuclear, coal and gas fired power stations are all positioned some considerable distance from human habitation.

Not so wind turbines where “official guidance” stipulates that turbines should be no closer than 1.5 miles from habitation – although the Noise Abatement Society recommends a distance of at least 10 miles.

Investigation of this “official guidance” is now needed as there are screeds of reports from professionals across the globe which document the affect on health of the low frequency noise emitted by turbines.

Governments need to carry out proper research into the long-term effect on public health. To say there is no scientific proof is no more than a denial of documented evidence.

AC Douglas

Castle Douglas, Kirkcudbrightshire

Letters to MPs, MSPs, MEPs and councillors:

Please read here an  Open letter to Ken MacIntosh MSP regarding a response from Scottish Water about their failure to meet Regulatory standards in the public water supply to 50,000 people during the construction of Whitelee windfarm.

Please also read here the  Cruach Mhor story from the diary of a family, complete with baby,  forced out of their home for two successive winters as a result of direct effects on their water supply due to adjacent windfarm construction.

These are not isolated events. Scottish water supplies need protection from industrialisation which is occurring on an unprecedented scale.

Thank you

Rachel Connor

Open letter to Dr Aileen Keel , Deputy Chief Medical Officer for Scotland.

Dear Dr Keel,

I am a semi retired radiologist ( ex GGHB) and for the past year, have been looking into the cause of serious water pollution  involving our private water supply, that coincided with the construction of the adjacent  Whitelee windfarm, the largest onshore windfarm in the UK, which straddles East Ayrshire, East Renfrewshire and North Lanarkshire.

In the course of my investigation , I discovered serious breaches in quality of the Public water supply to the 50,000 people in N. Kilmarnock and the Irvine Valley, with related failings of regulatory standards by Scottish water. The poor water quality  led to a 40% increase in turn,  for several months , of trihalomethanes (THMs)in the Public water supply.

THMs are recognised by the WHO as being a possible carcinogen ( based on laboratory animal experiments) and a probable carcinogen by US authorities ( based on population studies).

I have tried, unsuccessfully, to alert the Local authority and local MSPs and MPs and to get this information into the public domain.

I have now ‘published ‘ my findings on You tube and this link (below) has been sent to all MSPs and all Scottish MSPs , the Environment minister and SEPA, as well as many local authorities.

Parliamentary questions have also been tabled by Graeme Pearson MSP. ( Answers due by 28th August) It has been viewed in 16 countries in 7 days.

I believe there may be significant health risks to the general public and young infants in particular, with their  high body surface/mass ratios. These infants will probably have been at particular risk  if fed on formula milk accumulating potentially unacceptably high levels of THMs.

In addition, not mentioned in my presentation, there were serious, significantly elevated ,  prolonged periods of  the amount of excessive iron and manganese in the public water supply during the construction period of Whitelee windfarm, which may have been an unknown hazard to  patients with haemochromatosis with attendant increase in cirrhosis and hepatoma.

Scottish water have denied breaches of regulatory standards, although Amlaird water treatment works  in particular, was criticised in the Drinking Water Quality Regulators’ report for 2012.

My findings are now being assessed by the Renewable Energy Foundation. Their preliminary assessment is that there may well be substance to my concern about the ‘peat slide ‘ causing significant water contamination.

I would like to bring this presentation and my findings to your attention in the hope that there is a moratorium on the building of any further windfarms or turbines on water catchment areas,  until this has been properly investigated and the health risks quantified and made public.

This can be viewed at: 

Yours sincerely,

Dr Rachel Connor