With Thanks to Complete and Utter Zebu

Simon Rose reminded me with this report that if Carlsberg did disingenuous it would probably be the the "green" energy lobby.  In particluar and as Simon demonstrates, the wind power supporters do more than their fair share of manipulation.  Here's some examples from the European Wind Energy Association.  According to this august body the benefits include:

• "Wind power has a light footprint. Its, operation does not produce harmful emissions or any hazardous waste. It does not deplete natural resources, nor does it cause environmental damage, through resource extraction, transport, and waste management.
• In a wind farm the turbines themselves, take up less than 1% of the land area.  Once up and running, existing activities such as agriculture and hiking can continue around them. Farm animals such as cows and sheep are not disturbed.
• Any impacts on the local environment (see below) must be set against the much more serious effects of producing conventional electricity and thereby aggravating the pressures of climate change on the balance of nature."

Okay then let's look at those "benefits". 

• Certainly one turbine has a "light" footprint.  Except you need a lot of them to produce a reasonable amount of power.  True they don't emit any pollutants or gases but unless we re categorize excessive noise as "harmelss emissions" they do present a serious noise hazard.  Indeed the nearest a turbine can be placed to housing is 300m.  Just visulaise that for a minute.  Thats a 300m wide band of valuable land that can't be utilised due to noise.
• The second point is really the first regurgetated.  Loads of space between the turbines but only for deaf cattle and sheep it appears.
• The final point is trite in the extreme.  It assumes that the current methods are "aggravating climate change" which may be true but ignores nuclear energy which in my opnion would be a better method of producing power per M2 occupied.

But this website does not provide a balanced reply to each of its befeficial arguments.  It does do that for the disadvantages though.

• "Wind power’s overall impact on birds, bats, other wildlife and natural habitats is highly site specifi c. In addition, impacts from wind power are extremely low compared with other humanrelated activities. Deaths from birds fl ying into wind turbines represent a small fraction of those caused by other human-related sources such as cats and buildings.  US statistics show 1 billion birds are killed by colliding with buildings each year and up to 80 million by vehicles.  By comparison, it’s estimated that commercial wind turbines in the US cause the direct deaths of only 0.01 – 0.02% of all of the birds killed annually by collisions with man-made structures and activities."

I confess that this one makes me smile.  Apparently we would significantly reduce the amount of birds killed if we get rid of those nasty buildings and cats.  Of course with no buildings there'd be no need for power thus no need for wind turbines.  But the really good bit of the above logic is the stats concerning the percentage of birds killed by wind farms.  Could it just possibly be that there are significantly more square metres of buildings than there are wind turbines in the USA?

In short the wind power lobby is telling porky pies.