Michael Giberson
A shortened version of Michael Trebilcock’s commentary on wind power, mentioned here the other day, was published in the Financial Post under the not so subtle title of, “Wind power is a complete disaster.”
The Financial Post subsequently published a reply by Sigurd Lauge Pedersen, a Senior Adviser to the Danish Energy Agency: “Wind power works.”
Trebilcock is back in the Financial Post with “The myth of the Danish green energy ‘miracle’.”
Pedersen begins, “It is perfectly legitimate to hate wind power. But it is more convincing if you do your homework first.” Trebilcock, in his reply, begins by casting aspersions on the Danish government’s sensitivity to criticism of their wind power experience. Both authors have some helpful points to make, but I object to the unnecessarily strident and snide tone of the exchange. (Hey, that’s what blogs are for! -ed.)
If Pedersen had done his homework, say by reviewing the Arthur Campbell paper cited in Trebilcock’s submission to the Ontario Legislative Committee on the Green Energy Act (mentioned in the original op-ed), Pedersen would have realized that claiming wind power raises CO2 emissions is not absurd. Instead it is merely unlikely.
If Trebilcock were more careful, or maybe if he understood wind power better, he’d have avoided the modest non sequitur of, “Most wind turbines run at about 25% of rated capacity, requiring back-up generation for the balance of the time.” No one, so far as I am aware, expects to get a constant 100 percent of nameplate capacity delivered from their wind power (or any other) generation, so what “balance of the time” is he referring to?
It is well known that “facts” circulating in public discourse sometimes stray from their original meaning, so it is sometimes useful to track down sources. In the continuation I try to sort out two disputed claims made by Trebilcock in his first Financial Post op-ed.
