Children In Charge: The Adults Who Don't Understand What Wind Is

Adults with the intelligence of retarded children are in charge of our world, and we have to beat some sense into them, or throw them out of office.

Wind is energy. It blows atmospheric gas around the globe: oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, anything. But when wind energy is absorbed, for example by a turbine, it is converted into motion (of the turbine’s blades), heat (of its moving parts), or electricity (through its generator).

The conversion of wind into electricity requires a minimal force to overcome the friction of the turbine’s gears. Once the blades start moving, the efficiency of converting wind into electricity isn’t going to be 100%. It’s going to be far less than that.

The wind energy you’ve absorbed is now gone. Yet, fully grown human beings seem to miss this part of the equation. They think the wind just “blows through” the turbine, as though wind can blow against a wall and come out the other side.

I call these people “grown-ups with the intelligence of a retarded child”. They are legion. This gem came right after a woman told me that “farms aren’t built by White people, they are stolen”, as though farms require no effort whatsoever to produce food in large quantities, and you can find farms in wild nature just waiting for farmers to put the food in boxes.

No, once you’ve converted a certain amount of wind into heat, motion, or electricity (or something else), it’s gone. It’s why you can’t place infinite rows of wind turbines out at sea. Locally, the wind’s yield dies down to 0 after passing through just four or five rows of spinning blades.

Too many turbines right behind each other act as though it were a wall, stopping the wind.

Yet, politicians and even smart people with suits and ties have traditionally assumed that any row of turbines placed behind others will reap the same 100% of electricity as the front rows.

Politicians have based their math on such false assumptions, namely to sell wind projects to the taxpayer. The promised 100% yield turns out to be 30%, and then, all of a sudden, the turbines no longer yield enough profits to pay for their costs. But taxpayers, despite having been robbed by scammers, won’t revolt, because they don’t understand what happened.

What is happening here is classic capitalism: A whole industry has arisen to maximize the sale of turbines. Not to solve humanity’s energy problem. But to maximize sales. As a consequence of this political retardation, we’ve ended up building turbines in places where the wind rarely blows, or we’re finding out that, in many cases, turbines don’t break even in the cost-benefit analysis.

The most profitable sites to build wind turbines are out at sea. But we can’t just build turbines in the middle of the ocean. We can only build turbines close to the coastal line where the sea isn’t too deep.

Now this poses another problem: All the wind absorbed coming from the oceans—wind that normally blows onto land—now no longer blows onto land. The basic principle here is that any amount of wind absorbed by turbines is no longer available for “other purposes”.

In fact, the continent of Europe is much warmer than Canada for this reason that cold Canadian wind is heated up over the Atlantic Ocean, and this warmer wind makes Europe a more pleasant place. If this logic were ever disrupted, either by messing with the ocean currents, or by blocking off (or diverting) large enough forces of wind with walls of turbines along the coast, Europe may become a frozen hell, like Canada, and hundreds of millions of Europeans will have to emigrate to North Africa or South Central Asia. (Source: The Ascent of Mind)

You see, wind may be “renewable” but the rate of wind isn’t “infinite”. Wind is apparently caused by the uneven heating of the Earth’s surface by the Sun. Hot in once place, colder in another, and this causes wind to blow from the hotter place toward the colder place due to pressure differences.

What turbines and other wind-capturing technology does is stop some of the wind from blowing by absorbing it. Imagine if we stopped all wind from blowing, and converted the global winds entirely into electricity? The Earth would have no way of dissipating heat, and the whole planet would melt down like Venus.

We are, obviously, nowhere near this far-away catastrophe. But it’s important that the dynamics are understood. Wind that is absorbed here, will no longer blow there. Plastering the planet over with turbines will ultimately have ecological and climatic consequences.

But, for now, Bob Johnson, CEO of Bob’s Turbine Company, just wants to sell more turbines, because government subsidies make it profitable to do so.