Proponents of renewable energy will grab on to any sign of success.
That’s precisely what The Guardian (UK) did on July 10, when it ran a misleading headline claiming, “Wind power generates 140% of Denmark's electricity demand [1].” The idea presented by the headline, was far from accurate, but the hype was no surprise. The Guardian long ago abandoned objectivity on energy issues in favor of climate alarmism and activism. It actively opposes fossil fuels use with the ongoing #KeepItInTheGround [2] campaign.
The article by Europe environment correspondent Arthur Neslen made it sound like Denmark had fulfilled all its energy needs with wind power and had some left to spare. But upon closer reading, Neslen talking about one “unusually windy” day (July 9, 2015). Not a month. Not a week. One single day.
That tiny success was trumpeted by The Guardian and other news outlets as a major victory for wind power. Neslen even quoted European Wind Energy Association spokesman Oliver Joy, who insisted that Denmark’s one-day wind energy windfall “shows that a world powered 100% by renewable energy is no fantasy.”
Neslen also said that the “British wind industry may view the Danish achievement with envy” after losing government subsidies and because of “planning obstacles.”
Similar claims have been made before, but wind power proponents in the media and elsewhere ignore wind power’s major flaws.
Center for Industrial Progress President and Founder Alex Epstein observed that “[w]ind is constantly varying, sometimes disappearing nearly completely” in his book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. That means sometimes there can be no wind, and therefore, no wind energy.
“[S]ometimes the combined output of solar and wind is relatively high—and sometimes it is nothing; that is the nature of an intermittent, unreliable source,” Epstein said about overly optimistic claims about renewable “successes” in Denmark’s neighbor Germany.
Epstein also pointed out that a more “reliable source” of energy like coal was required to “do the heavy lifting,” because unreliable energy sources have to be backfilled by a steady form of energy (usually natural gas or coal).