Relax - wind farms aren't stressing out your emus
Posted Wed 27 Nov 2013, 3:28pm AEDT
What links the phenomena of allegedly stressed emus, dancing cattle and disoriented echidnas? Nothing but the ill-founded trend to blame anything and everything on wind farms, writes Simon Chapman.
Last week in Nova Scotia, the Canadian Atlantic province where midwinter temperatures fall to
-20 degrees celsius, a small emu farm
closed down. There's nothing unusual about this. Investment in emu farming was an ill-fated get-rich-quick bubble that burst in Canada over a decade ago. It has been described as a "
failed industry".
But what made this sad story even sadder was that the husband and wife team behind it blamed the closure on wind turbines, saying they had seen many of their birds lose weight and die of "stress". Tellingly, no necropsies were performed, prompting one person to
comment, "So they didn't have necropsies performed on any of the animals? That is extremely irresponsible farming. The department of Agriculture should be called in to inspect for animal cruelty."
As the picture illustrating this story shows, in Australia, where emus don't tend to be kept in pens and fed on pellets, the birds roam freely around turbines, among sheep and cattle.
But this morning in my email, a jubilant anti-wind-farm activist from rural NSW used the emu story to undermine the idea that wind-farm health complaints might be explained by negative thoughts about wind-farms, known as the "nocebo effect":
We were was also wondering if you know how the 'nocebo effect' works in emus? Is it a communicated disease and just how do the emus spread the word? Do you think if they paid the emus they may not have had a problem?
Nice try. But no cigar. Because if you peer just below the surface of these claims, there are obvious unanswered questions about effects on animals.
My ever-expanding collection of (now)
234 diseases and symptoms attributed to wind turbines includes many about animals. Some of the more interesting ones include reports of "
dancing cattle" ("Cattle have been videotaped 'dancing' or lifting hooves repetitively from being shocked by electrical voltage in the ground" said to be leaking from wind turbines);
bee extinction; a farmer opining that echidnas are disoriented by turbines, causing them to "dig up more soil looking for food than before and that they could pinpoint the location of their food source much more accurately back then (before turbines were installed)"; and the death of "
more than 400 goats" on an outlying Taiwanese island.
Four hundred is a nice big number for goats, and oddly enough, it's the same number of goats that allegedly "
dropped dead" in New Zealand! In
Wisconsin, too, a farmer claims he lost most of his cattle herd after turbines were installed. Anti-wind-farm websites are awash with these astonishing claims that seem to have escaped the relevant authorities. Try searching for any official corroboration in government or official investigations and you'll be looking for a long time.
As anyone with even a passing familiarity with farming knows, mass or unusual deaths in livestock are of intense interest to governments because of concerns about infectious diseases with the potential to devastate the farming sector and export trade, or even lead to animal to human transmission. Concern about diseases like brucellosis, avian influenza and hendra virus see authorities isolate farms and destroy all remaining stock. Massive publicity follows. But when 400 goats unaccountably "drop dead" or a farmer reports lots of dead emus, these same government authorities are nowhere to be seen. It must be a conspiracy of silence.
All of the problems the anti's claim that wind turbines cause in humans occur in
every community, regardless of whether they are near wind farms or not. Forty-five per cent of people report symptoms of
insomnia at least once a week.
Anxiety and depression are widespread. Getting old? Hair turning grey or receding? Eyesight, hearing, balance problems increasing with age? Putting on or losing weight? You need to know that
all of these problems are apparently caused by wind turbines.
Many of the claims about animals fall into the same category. Yolkless eggs and those without shells are phenomena known to every poultry farmer, as this
advisory site shows. But when such eggs are lain by chickens belonging to someone who doesn't like wind farms then
Robert's your father's brother, it can only have been caused by the dastardly turbines! Dogs, horses, sheep, cattle, getting listless, skitty, off their food ... or anything really: wind turbines are to blame.
Every day in every country, thousands of people are diagnosed for the first time with one of countless health problems. They weren't having the symptoms that drove them to the doctor a few months ago, and now they have the diagnosis, they start thinking about what might have caused it. If they don't like the look of wind farms, or have been exposed to scary tales about all the things that can happen, and live near a wind farm, then the
post hoc ergo propter hoc (after therefore because of) heuristic can powerfully kick in to make sense of the new problem.
Eighteen years ago, Australian news media were awash with stories of community
panics about mobile telephone towers being likely to cause cancers. These never eventuated, with the age-adjusted incidence of almost all cancers in Australia
flat-lining. Today, there are
occasional reprises of this hysteria, but with the ubiquity of mobile phones, familiarity has calmed the situation. The current fringe hysteria about wind farms is likely to go the same way.
Simon Chapman AO is professor of Public Health at the University of Sydney and 2013 Australian Skeptic of the Year. View his full profile here.
In a recent report released by RWE, the second largest electricity producer in Germany, the company has confirmed it is planning to withdraw 3.1 gigawatts of fossil fuel generating capacity from the electricity market.
By comparison, to get a new wind farm up in Australia requires in the realm of $100 per MWh, although exceptional wind speeds and Trustpower’s low cost of capital allowed Snowtown II to go ahead with a price in the realm of $85 per MWh. Also, such Australian projects don’t have the benefit of being backed by a 35-year price guarantee from the UK Treasury. If they did the price would be even lower.
Now before I go on, I’d like to point out I’m a fan of nuclear power. I make no apologies for it. Anything which you can buy from a supplier today knowing for sure it can produce very large quantities of low emission power is worth serious consideration. Yes, there are risks – if you build a plant poorly or it is near a seismic fault line or you have a regulator in bed with the industry you can get some pretty shocking results. But I think that on balance the risks are manageable and worth taking, given its benefits.
But we’ve got to be honest with ourselves about the costs of nuclear power.
The problem to date with nuclear power has been that it’s been nearly impossible to nail down just how much they actually cost. In western countries that have liberalised electricity markets, where prices and government subsidies tend to be reasonably transparent, there hasn’t been a nuclear plant built in decades. The one recent build in Finland, Olkiluoto, is hardly a glowing advertisement, with the budget blowing out to €8.5 billion ($12.31 billion), or almost three times the delivery price of €3 billion.
The same cost uncertainty besets coal with carbon capture and storage, although the uncertainty is worse than nuclear.
By comparison, working out the costs of a gas turbine, wind power or solar panels is far more straightforward. There is an active market in these products where you can get reliable quotes for supply to Australia. And projects are being installed in Australia and in large numbers across a wide range of countries and market structures. Also, construction of wind and solar projects are a relatively simple proposition, meaning less chance of nasty time and budget blowout surprises, unlike nuclear. This gives us much greater confidence about their costs.
The other thing worth noting about the UK project is that this is not a first-of-a-kind plant. It is the third European pressurised reactor built by EDF (the other two, Olkiluoto and Flamanville, have had large time and budget blowouts). Also, if EDF were to proceed with constructing another nuclear plant at Sizewell in the UK, then it has only agreed to lower the price of power it will supply to $151 per MWh.
So if nuclear is so expensive, why is the UK government doing this?
1. Because its wind and solar resources are far worse than Australia’s and so nuclear’s economics are quite attractive. In reality the UK actually has a reasonably okay wind resource but it has let wind farm NIMBY-ism get out of control;
2. Because it has a bipartisan consensus that climate change is a serious problem;
3. It provides a hedge against gas prices that are at the whim of global oil and gas market dynamics – something we’re about to also experience soon; and
4. It faces a looming generation supply shortage because existing aging plant needs to shut soon.
Given the four points above they concluded this was a necessary deal to make, even if they would prefer a more market-driven process.
It also provides a superb illustration that cost dynamics for power generation technologies can be highly geographically specific. One needs to be very careful in translating the experiences of one country in power generation to another. This is something many Australian nuclear advocates, who are often not active participants in the power market, have difficulty with.