Monday 26/3/2007 Page: 7
THOSE claiming wind turbines do little to cut greenhouse gas emissions do not understand how the national power grid works, according to Victoria's Energy and Resources Minister. Peter Batchelor says the amount of power entering the grid is measured every five minutes and changes made depending on peak demands.
At any one time power enters the grid from a variety of sources including wind, solar, coal and from hydro-electricity which could come from Tasmania, NSW or Victoria. The Victorian Government has made it law for renewable energy to be made available to consumers who want to pay for it.
Mr Batchelor says renewable energy contributes about four per cent of Victoria's energy production and the government plans for this figure to be 10 per cent by 2016. He says the industry has created jobs in regional Victoria with a wind blade factory in Portland and a wind tower engineering firm employing about 200 people. For farmers there is considerable incentive to accommodate turbines, with the possibility of receiving $4000 to $8000 a year per tower.
A wind atlas produced in 2003 by Sustainability Victoria shows the average wind speed around Ballarat was more than 7m a second compared to the state average of 6.5m a second.
Mr Batchelor says Victoria's five wind farms generated 350 gigawatt hours of power a year, enough to power 60,000 households. "The use of wind is a really important use of technology to combat climate change. We are experiencing climate change at the moment and we can't walk away from it," Mr Batchelor said.
Geelong lawyer and Victorian Landscape Guardians president Randall Bell believes the turbines are an ineffective eyesore. "It looks like the Ballarat landscape is going to be zapped by what is proposed," lie said. He considers the return from wind turbines so small to be not worth bothering with.
"Two months of bushfires is nearly two years worth of Victoria's greenhouse gas emissions." He also does not believe global warming is a man-induced phenomenon and says rising temperatures cause increases in greenhouse gases rather than the other way around. Mr Bell said initially he thought wind power was a "brilliant" idea that had visual problems. Now he says he doesn't "know of any benefits, only disadvantages".
(Randall Bell's understanding of the Law appears to exceed his understanding of wind energy - Blair)
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