Open letter to Councils between Rockingham and Margaret River

1

Dear Elected Councillor,

I am writing to you and to every single one of your colleagues in every Council up and down the Coast of WA whose constituents are directly impacted by the Federal Government’s proposal to approve nearly 7,700km2 of Ocean for development of Wind Turbines between Mandurah and past Cape Naturalist. This is an open letter and will be submitted to mainstream media outlets for publication and will also be published via alternative media on the internet.

I write to you to urge you to formally oppose the Wind Farm proposal as a Council and individually as a Councillor. It is important to add the official opposition of local elected representatives to the individual opposition, as protests of large groups of individuals are often ignored by Government, but it is much harder for one tier of Government to push ahead with its plans if it is officially opposed by another tier of Government.

Please put a motion to your fellow Councillors to officially oppose the Wind Farm proposal as a Council, vote on the motion and if you get a majority, instruct your CEO to make your formal opposition to the Federal Government’s plans known.

Should you fail to get a majority in the vote, then I urge you to still put an official opposition to the Federal Government using your official position as an elected representative of your community.

The Federal Government’s proposal, if approved, will see more than 1,300 wind turbines dumped into the Ocean that will soar 268 meters above sea level. This is 20 meters taller than the highest building in Perth CBD and almost 4 times the height of the Rendevous Hotel in Scarborough, which is currently the tallest building on the WA Coast, at just 70 meters in height. They will be visible from as far north as Rockingham and as far South as Prevelly by Margaret River. The ocean floor will be up to 100 meters under the water and so the total height of the turbines will be up to 378 meters from ocean floor to their tops. To put this in perspective the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France is just 300 meters tall. Would you sanction even one Eiffel Tower to be dumped in the ocean, much less 1,300 of them?

None of these Turbines will add a single extra watt of on demand power to the grid. Instead it will double the infrastructure to provide the same amount of power as the coal or gas powered generation that must be constantly online ready to back up the wind. Wind energy that can drop to zero for days on end and wind that can also blow way too strongly to be safe to allow the turbines to operate. For those of you who think storage will solve this issue, I must refute such thinking. Batteries (which are much more toxic than anything coming from coal mining or coal burning and must be frequently replaced) cannot provide more than an hour or two of back up power for the whole system. The 20GW wind farm proposal for the Southwest will need 480 Gigawatt hours (GWh) of storage capacity just to back up the wind turbines for a single day. As you may have noticed it is possible to have an entire week with barely any wind. The world’s biggest battery is set to be built in NSW and will only provide 2.4GWh of storage at a cost of $2.4 Billion. So if you wanted to provide just 1 hour of back up for 20GW of wind turbines, then you would need more than eight of them at a cost of nearly $20 Billion. Back up for a day at $48 Billion and back up for a week at $3.36 Trillion! Don’t forget, if the wind is recharging the battery, that energy is not providing power to the grid. You need energy to do both.

The fact is, mega batteries are not used for back up power at all. They are instead used for frequency stabilisation as the erratic nature of wind can cause surges and dips in power which can blow up transformers and cause power cuts. But the more wind power that is put into the grid the harder it becomes to keep that power stable.

Not only will coal and gas be used to back up the wind when it doesn’t blow or when it blows too strongly to be safe, it must be on constant stand-by dumping energy in the form of steam into the atmosphere. It must also SUPPLY electricity to the turbines a lot of the time to help them to turn.

The wind turbines are made of concrete, steel, balsa wood and toxic resin. The balsa wood is made by clearing rain forests. This is then covered in toxic resin to make the turbine blades, and these blades must be frequently replaced and cannot be recycled. Instead they are either dumped into the ocean or into landfill where the resin slowly leaches into the ocean or ground water and soil.

The Southwest coast of WA is full of endangered marine life, including coral, dolphins and migrating whales. Birds are a frequent victim of these giant blenders.

The proposal states that every 2GW of Wind Turbine development will require 6,000 workers to build and 3,000 workers to maintain. So we can extrapolate from this that 60,000 workers will be required to build 20GW and will require 30,000 people to maintain. People who are clueless on economics will scream “we’re providing jobs!”, but we want fewer people providing our power not more. If it takes 1 person to provide electricity to 100 people and everyone earns the same, then we will only require 1% of our income to power our homes and businesses. But if it requires 10 people per 100 then electricity costs will rise to 10% of our income.

60,000 workers will require homes to live in. They will likely have to be imported from overseas. Housing in the Southwest is already under strain. Who will build all the extra homes required? Who will build all the extra roads required? The Bussell Highway upgrade is still not finished after 4 years. Must we endure roadworks forever?

All of this because of a so called “Net zero carbon” goal, to fight man made climate change. There is no such thing as “Net zero carbon”. It is an arbitrary selective wish list that only exists on paper. Every human activity puts carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, wind turbines not least. Concrete and steel production both emit huge amounts of it into the atmosphere. As for “climate change” any official who still believes we are in any danger from our carbon dioxide emissions is guilty of criminal negligence. There is no excuse anymore. It’s been a generation since Tim Flannery told us Perth would be the world’s first climate change ghost city within a generation and it’s been 36 years since original climate shyster James Hansen told the US Congress we had 10 years to save the planet, or within 20 years New York would be under 10 feet of water. Instead of arresting these fraudsters they are allowed to keep pushing the date of doomsday further and further into the future. I could tell you how the whole science behind it is a fraud as well, but I had to write a whole book to cover that properly (I will happily give you a free copy if you ask! Or you can look me and my books up on Amazon if you prefer.)

If the above has not convinced you that this project should be opposed with every fibre of your being and every ounce of authority from your elected office, then it will have to be assumed that you are not fit for office. That either stupidity, brainwashing or corruption has made you ineligible.

If you are waiting for “public support” before acting, then you are also unfit for office. There is nothing more reprehensible than a coward. We do not live under a system of direct democracy, but of representative democracy. This means most people elect someone they think they can trust to make decisions without them, so that they can get on with living their busy lives. They have no time to research the truth, THAT’S WHAT THEY ELECT AND PAY YOU FOR!! It’s only when you betray that trust by lining your own pockets or turning a blind eye to things you should know are bad, that the general public take an interest in your decisions.

So take heed. Voting you out might not be enough for the asleep mob, who is at the moment content to go to work Monday to Friday and watch the footy on the idiot box every weekend. History is full of examples of people in power coming undone because they assumed that the docile population would always remain so and could be abused and exploited at will.

At the very least, you risk loosing your seat at the next election and facing some choice words from angry residents if you fail to officially oppose these wind turbines.

Yours sincerely,

Stephen Wells (concerned citizen)

P.S. I could search out a bunch of links to back up all of my claims, but you shouldn’t need any. If you don’t have enough common sense to grasp that you can’t provide power on demand with erratic intermittent wind and that sticking even a single skyscraper into the ocean is bloody insanity, then no amount of links will change your mind.

You can find Stephen Wells at Telegram and purchase his books here.