The winds of change
To the Editor,
And so the travesty and haste of renewable investiture continues unabated with no acknowledgement or understanding of the complexities in achieving true sustainability in the energy sector.
Our once unique countryside is about to bristle and be littered with worshipful three-bladed crucifixes, though unlike any loving God, they are an indifferent, unsightly, degrading and a sterile insignia of an incompetent, deluded, desperate and short-sighted government and their sheep-like followers and believers.
In the Riverina we will daily face the violation of our pristine rolling saltbush plains.
Our once clear and unadulterated blue sky will be blotted out by these hideous symbols of divine and disputable progress, brought to us to supposedly supply jointly with the dazzling vast sea of scarce non-renewable materials paying homage to the sun, our entire energy needs at an undisclosed mounting cost to industry and the now deprived, battling citizen.
The mammoth subsidy to wind and solar power providers is cunningly not calculated by our government in the escalating cost of electricity to the befuddled taxpayer.
Nor is the huge cost of perpetual, regular maintenance, short-term replacement of component parts and a dwindling supply of essential minerals on the planet to support renewables.
Meanwhile, trucks rumble past in endless succession with their noxious seven to eight cubic metre loads of environmentally polluting elements.
Each dumps a mere portion of upwards 850 cu metres of concrete and 110 tonnes of reinforcing steel needed to form a tower base four metres deep of almost one-third of an acre of concrete to give long life erectile function to these symbols of unpredictable, variable power and divinity.
The shameful footprint of this abuse on Australia’s once pristine land and seascape is being carried out all over the world but mercifully, some European countries are now beginning to realise the error of their ways.
The creation of wind turbines involves an enormous industrial process intricately linked to the oil industry.
Furthermore, the transportation of the massive components to their installation sites requires the use of heavy-duty trucks, trains and ships, all powered by diesel.
Lubrication is a crucial aspect of the running of these turbines and oils and greases used to protect moving parts and to prevent overheating and corrosion are mainly derived from petroleum.
A five-megawatt wind turbine requires 2,649 litres of costly synthetic fluid with oil change intervals between nine and sixteen months.
We conveniently forget that the production of steel in the transmission towers is an energy-intensive process that still relies heavily on fossil fuels.
Astonishingly, with all those unsightly transmission lines going up to hideously scar farmland, forest and crown land there is not one aboriginal protest.
Yet when it suits the present government, indigenous bans are opportunely fabricated as the reason for politically waiving any important project that may greatly benefit all the people of Australia.
The certainty of the dismissal of wind turbines and their replacement by sensible, cleaner, reliable and, in the long run, more affordable nuclear power will leave millions of tonnes of worthless solid waste underground in the paddock for the next millennium, conspicuously marked by now obsolete, soaring dysfunctional phallic columns as a gloating, everlasting, and repugnant reminder of human stupidity and false faith.
We are at a precarious juncture now where we cannot trust the experts pushing renewables only for their own benefit or the misleading statements being made by an infantile government in order to gain another term of division in this once great country of ours.
I heard the guarded retort of a renewable energy organisation CEO recently when she stated, ‘I remind you that energy from the sun and wind comes at zero cost!’
Are we really that stupid?
Christopher David McClelland. Hay.
