The Democratic Labor Party (DLP) opposes this highly subsidised method of generating electricity as a substitute or replacement for baseline power such as coal, gas or hydro electric.
Since taking up his role as a Senator, John Madigan has questioned the viability and the so-called reports that have been commissioned on the health effects of these expensive, ugly machines. While power companies keen to get their hands on taxpayers funds will make every attempt to talk up the viability of wind farms, the logic simply doesn’t add up.
The DLP calls for a moratorium to halt the construction of any further commercial wind farms until a proper assessment of the financial viability and health risks are addressed.
Despite the complaints of noise, health and wildlife destruction, wind farms will not deliver the power required to drive us forward either in the short or long term.
The high cost of subsidising these ugly blights on our landscape is another major problem. We have already seen the failures around the world where thousands of wind turbines have been abandoned.
Hawaii shut down their experiment when Apollo Energy failed there in 2006. California, which once boasted some 80% of the world’s wind generation and operated in some of the world’s best wind sites now has over 14,000 abandoned wind turbines scattered around there countryside. As Andrew Walden from “American Thinker” put it, they are “spinning, post-industrial junk which generates nothing but bird kills.”
The failures of wind farms can be seen everywhere and the high cost of trying to subsidise these inefficient and costly monsters has especially been felt in Europe.
Germany has moved back to building new coal-fired power stations and Holland recently slashed their renewable subsidies there. European taxpayers have reportedly wasted over 285 Billion Euros on subsidising renewable energy and this alone should be a warning to our government and the taxpayers of Australia.
The DLP will push for the retention of our cheap, clean and efficient coal fired power stations and look to a more transitional model of using coal gasification and other clean coal technologies that would be far less costly to the taxpayer, while producing a secure and solid baseline for our grid.