This story comes out of Southern Italy.
Anti-Mafia magistrates in Sicily have opened a sweeping investigation into the wind power sector where local officials, entrepreneurs and crime gangs are suspected of collusion in the construction of lucrative wind farms before their eventual sale to multinational companies.
Italian and EU subsidies for the building of wind farms and the world’s highest guaranteed rates, €180 ($240, £160) per kwh, for the electricity they produce have turned southern Italy into a highly attractive market exploited by organised crime.
So, the question I have here is this.
When have you ever known organised crime groups to act out of altruism?
This most effectively demonstrates that they are not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts for the sake of the environment.
This is where most environmentalist arguments fall down. For so long they have to gone to great lengths to tell us that electrical power can be generated freely using the Sun and the Wind as the generating force. The thing they fail to account for is the enormous costs in constructing these plants that will generate the electricity.
As an example I will use two renewable plants in the U.S. and compare them with a large coal fired power plant.
For Wind Power, the CapeWind facility proposed for Nantucket Sound in Massachusetts has a nameplate Capacity of 420MW from its 140 huge towers. It will operate at an efficiency of 30%, and will produce usable power over the whole year of 1.1 Billion KWH The cost is $1.2 Billion.
For Solar power Abengoa’s Solana Plant proposed for Gila Junction in Arizona has a nameplate capacity of 280MW. It also will operate at an efficiency of only 30%, and will produce only 740 million KWH of power extrapolated out over the year. It’s cost is around $1.1 Billion.
For that same amount of money you can construct a large coal fired power plant of 2,000MW nameplate capacity. It will operate at an efficiency of 85% and will produce 15 Billion KWH of usable electricity, 15 times as much as a wind plant for the same cost, and 21 times the power of the Solar plant, also for the same cost.
Even when compared with a Nuclear plant of large capacity, say 2,200MW, which will operate at 93% efficiency, and will produce 18 Billion KWH over the year, and even though five times the cost of the wind and solar plants, it is still a third the cost of wind and one quarter the cost of solar per KWH, and what needs to be taken into account here is that the nuclear plant will last twice as long as either of those renewable plants.
These huge costs need to be taken into account at the front end prior even to planning, and that is why not very many Companies are getting into the generation of electrical power by these renewable methods. Because of those immense costs at the front end, the only way they can be made to look attractive is if Governments actually subsidise them, and by that I don’t mean just small amounts, but on a dollar for dollar basis, and even more. Even after construction the cost of the electricity actually sold to the grid is also being subsidised by Governments, because costs from the construction extrapolated out over the life of the plant effectively mean that those costs will never be recovered. To that end Governments then have to kick in more huge amounts of money to make the plant viable in any respect at all.
That is why this story from Southern Italy shows just why organised crime is getting into the construction phases of these renewable plants, to get their hands on all that lovely Government money used to subsidise construction of these plants.
Again, all this most effectively demonstrates is that the introduction of renewable power generating plants has absolutely nothing to do with the environment. It’s just about the money.
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Posted on 05/06/2009 by TonyfromOz
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