NCPR News Archive - Governor cautious on wind power

Last week in Watertown, Governor Paterson was asked for his opinion about the wind power projects near the St. Lawrence River in Cape Vincent, Clayton, and Hammond. He said wind power developers need to be “more careful about siting” in the region, given the St. Lawrence River’s “cultural and historic value”. That sounded extremely cautionary for a Governor who’s just proposed ambitious growth plans for wind and solar energy in New York. So David Sommerstein called Paul DeSotis, deputy energy secretary for Governor Paterson, to interpret the Governor’s remarks. Speaking while on a layover at National airport, DeSotis said Paterson was referring to wind power’s intermittency – wind turbines only make electricity when the wind’s blowing. And he was talking about bottlenecks in the state’s power grid that make it hard to send electricity from northern New York – where the wind is – downstate to where the most demand is.

Wind Watch: Wind power will always let us down just when we need it most

Just over a week ago the Renewable Energy Foundation stated, with regard to the amount of power generated by wind farms over the two weeks of the festive season: “This shows that wind provides very little firm, reliable capacity. At times of high demand in cold weather there is a tendency for there to be no wind.”

Surely those still believing wind is our salvation must concede wind power will make no difference. Even if we can have a worldwide grid to level out production, who will pay for it and when would it be in place?

Yet our masters in Brussels require that by 2020 more than one-third of EU electricity will come from renewables, with wind the biggest contributor. Wind this may be but it will not generate electricity.

If I was looking for a sound investment for the future I would put my money in candles.

The Reference Frame: HadCRUT3: autocorrelation and records

According to all the sensible models I can imagine to match the data, the typical "random" change of the temperature that we get every century is 0.5 - 1.0 °C, so there is nothing unusual about our seeing the very same thing in the 20th century. There is no observational evidence in the instrumental data for an underlying trend that would exceed the noise (random walk). Only if the temperature change per century became much greater than 1 °C, something like 3 °C to approach the 4-sigma territory, we would have a reason to think about the underlying trend and perhaps even be concerned. It's surely not the case of our situation in 2009.

Pigs fly: JIM HANSEN'S/GISS TEMPERATURE TREND REVISED DOWNWARD

At the very end of the GISS update, under para #4 in the next to last paragraph, Hansen & Co state that: "From climate models and empirical analyses this GHG forcing translates into a mean warming rate of 0.15C per decade". Given that Jim Hansen is one of the leading and vocal proponents of the AGW/ACC hypothesis, that the GISS temperature data series has yet again come close scrutiny recently [Lubos Motl, et. al] and that GISS temperature data is increasingly at odds with satellite data [ref: today's posting on that subject at www.wattsupwiththat.com ] this revision is singularly noteworthy: the revised GISS GHG driven temperature trend is a whopping 25% lower than the IPCC's [95% certain] "gold standard" of 0.20C per decade.