Climate clowns launch their latest wind farm disaster – and we all pay for it

By TONY MOBILIFONITIS
IT WAS a true gaggle of clowns, all grinning like they’ve just pulled off another silly stunt at the circus. That stunt was the recent launch of Squadron Energy’s Uungula Wind Farm, the largest being built in New South Wales, which it is claimed will “inject” $40 million into the local economy.

What Squadron Energy didn’t mention in their media release was that they will suck an annual subsidy of $48-$62 million for the 69 turbines out of the Australian economy – all paid for by taxpayers and power consumers across Australia. Cairns News asked the company to confirm or deny this, but there has been no response.

Cairns News has also heard that doctors are seeing serious health problems experienced by people who live near these wind farms. The Uungula Wind Farm is in the Spicer’s Creek district east of Dubbo and north-east of Wellington. Some three to five farm houses in the vicinity could be affected by wind farm noise.

The $48-$62 million subsidy estimate is based on figures supplied by a former Liberal Party Senate staffer Alex Nichol, who was involved in the renewable energy sector. She told Cafe Locked Out host Michael Gray Griffith that operators of wind turbines get a subsidy of $600,000 to $900,000 per turbine, per year. She said the cost to the Australian economy was about $40 billion a year.

“And effectively, that money, that subsidy that’s getting paid to the wind farms is reaming $40 billion a year out of the Australian economy, and it’s paid by everyone – every pensioner, householder, schools, hospitals, everyone, and it’s not just out of your tax, it’s out of your power bill,” she said.

She went on to explain the sick joke that these towers provide free energy. “They don’t work because for a start they draw power off the grid, so they have to have coal-fired power in order to turn – they’re not windmills, they’re turbines.”

She said that only when the wind picked up did they start to create power of their own. “But that electricity is so intermittent and unreliable it has to be balanced on the grid, which you can’t do because you can’t ramp your coal-fired power stations up and down.” So the coal-fired power station simply turns the unused output into steam.

Two other prominent clowns at the launch were Twiggy “Green Guru” Forrest and Chris “Bozo” Bowen, both also grinning broadly, as if they had somehow achieved something good. But wind farms are not only a taxpayer-funded grift, they are a serious health hazard to animals and humans.

Nina Pierpont, MD, PhD, a Canadian pediatrician and author of “Wind Turbine Syndrome: A Report on a Natural Experiment” (2009) spoke at an international symposium in Picton, Ontario, this month on adverse health effects from the global wind industry.

She admitted that to stand beneath a wind turbine was “breathtaking” but to live near one can be hell on earth. “So I have been told by countless people who suddenly find themselves grievously ill from the subtle yet devastating infrasonic jackhammer generated by these ‘clean, green, renewable energy’ giants,” she said.

She believes the reason may be tucked away in the inner ear in a cluster of tiny, interconnected organs with a remarkable evolutionary pedigree – the vestibular organs, the semicircular canals, saccule, and utricle, that function as Mother Nature’s gyroscope, controlling our sense of motion, position, and balance, including our spatial thinking and related to child car or seasickness.

“One of those functions, it now appears, is to register and respond to the sounds and vibrations (infrasound) we don’t consciously hear, but feel – as from wind turbines. For many people, the response is swift and disastrous.”

Dr Pierpont said that as a country doctor six years ago she began hearing health complaints from people living in the shadow of these gigantic turbines. At first it was merely local and regional, then global and tellingly, most described the same constellation of symptoms ranging from sleep disturbance to headaches, tinnitus, ear pressure, dizziness, vertigo, nausea, visual blurring, tachycardia, irritability, problems with concentration and memory.

“None of these people had experienced these symptoms to any appreciable degree before the turbines became operational. All said their symptoms disappeared rapidly whenever they spent several days away from home,” she said.

“All said the symptoms reappeared when they returned home. Many had supported the wind farm project before all this happened. Now, some became so ill, they literally abandoned their homes – locked the door and left.”

Taking her cue from a British country doctor reporting identical wind turbine symptoms among patients, she did what clinicians call a case series. “I interviewed 10 families (38 people) both here and abroad, who had either left their homes or were about to leave. I found a statistically significant correlation between the telltale symptoms and pre-existing motion sensitivity, inner ear damage, and migraine disorder,” she said.

“Each is a risk factor for what I now christened Wind Turbine Syndrome. My data suggest, further, that young children and adults beyond age 50 are also at substantial risk.” She said the response from ear, nose, throat clinicians was immediate and encouraging.

One was Dr. F. Owen Black, a neuro-otologist who consults for the US Navy and NASA and another Dr Alec Salt at the Washington University School of Medicine, who recently published an NIH-funded, peer-reviewed study demonstrating that infrasound increases pressure inside both the cochlea and vestibular organs, distorting both balance and hearing.

“My role is over. My waiting room is full. It’s time for governments to study this wind-generated scourge whose cure is simple. A 2 kilometere setback (larger in hilly or mountainous terrain) fixes it. Wind developers, not unexpectedly, refuse to acknowledge the problem. They ridicule it as hysteria and NIMBYism (“Not In My Back Yard!”)—and refuse to build their machines 2 km (1.24 miles) away from homes.

Lisa van der Wilt, from Watson, Saskatchewan, posted on social media that she lived near wind turbines aged 13 to 15 years old and found herself with blood iron levels so low the doctor didn’t know how she was standing.

“Sleep it was horrific. We tried everything so we could sleep. The vivid nightmares. I got severe depression and could barely leave the house. I had pain through my stomach and no doctor saw nothing. But if I left home for more than a couple hours the pain would go away. These things are an abomination to your health. They truly are.”

But such health issues are no concern for the wind farm climate clowns. Twiggy Forrest, for instance, is chairman of Tattarang, whose wholly-owned portfolio company is Squadron Energy, and is fully committed to financing Squadron’s 14 gigawatt “development pipeline”.

“This is a huge announcement from a major Australian company that is getting on with the job of building the renewable energy capacity required to deliver the green power Australia urgently needs,” Forrest said.

Forrest claims he is “investing in Australia’s green energy transition and creating jobs and economic development for regional Australia”. In reality he’s grifting off the massive government subsidies and the global scam of “green investment funds” that earn carbon credits.

Unsurprisingly, Forrest says said he supports the Federal Government’s “Capacity Investment Scheme as a mechanism to supercharge renewable energy development”, ie another taxpayer funded green grift.

It involves so-called revenue underwriting for successful CIS tender projects, with an agreed revenue ‘floor’ and ‘ceiling’ to provide a “long-term revenue safety-net that decreases financial risks for investors and encourages more investment when and where it is needed.”