In Brief: Launch the Wind Turbines Into Orbit
A tongue-in-cheek rebuttal to the energy policies touted by the increasingly ecofascist Left.
Wind mills aren’t the perfect solution to climate or energy problems, as it turns out. And Robert Zubrin, “president of a small aerospace company,” has a bit of fun at the expense of the ecofascists pushing them so hard by offering a plan that he acknowledges would benefit his own company.
It was recently reported that the Danish wind-energy-dominated electricity-generation system has failed to meet performance expectations, contributing to Europe’s catastrophic power shortage and incurring massive financial losses as a result.
The large-scale use of wind turbines to produce electricity has also slaughtered billions of birds. Furthermore, it has disrupted electrical grids by imposing massive power throttling and switching requirements on fossil-fuel or nuclear-power backup systems to match the unpredictable variation in output from the wind generators. In addition, the hordes of windmills necessary to produce such intermittent power at scale are ugly and desecrate any area they infest, on land or sea.
Zubrin says some folks may just be resigned to the inherent shortcomings of wind turbines, but he offers a solution: “Instead of mounting windmills on towers located on the ground, windmills should be launched into orbit.”
The benefits are manifest, he jokes:
Very few birds fly as high as Earth orbit, so putting our windmills there would greatly reduce the number of birds that they kill. This operation is essential, and not just to please bird-lovers and other soft-hearted types. Birds are the Earth’s defense force against insects. By slaughtering birds, ground-based windmills are contributing to insect crop damage and the spread of insect-borne diseases. Orbital windmills would not contribute to any such catastrophe.
Moving windmills from the ground to orbit would eliminate their aesthetic damage on both the natural and civil environments, thereby restoring real-estate values in afflicted localities. Crossing the night sky, they could be visible from Earth, but only as little moving stars, amusing to lovers, wishful children, and amateur astrophotographers seeking to demonstrate their virtuosity.
Most importantly, relocating windmills to orbit would allow them to regularize their power output, thereby eliminating the disruptions they have been imposing on the rest of the grid. The output of ground-based windmills varies widely and unpredictably from 0 to 100 percent. In contrast, an orbital windmill would always produce precisely the same amount of power: none at all.
That would make managing the grid a lot easier. He does concede that his plan “would involve significant cost,” but he argues that paying for it could happen “by increasing utility rates,” which would have the side, er, benefit of reducing electricity consumption, “thereby helping society reach the goal of net-zero carbon emissions as soon as possible.”
He concludes with the biggest zinger of all:
Some advocates of green-energy technology say that its goal should be to reduce power costs. That is absurd. Green energy can’t be used for such a purpose and shouldn’t be. If we want to reduce consumption, we need to make power as expensive as possible. The cleanest energy is no energy, preferably at high cost. Orbital windmills are the ideal technology to meet this requirement.
