Wind energy means a large-scal technological regression

Image: EIKE

In his presentation at the Climate and Energy Conference held by the Germany-based European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) in Halle, Prof. Horst-Joachim Lüdecke explored the energy efficiency of wind turbines and finds that it is a terribly inefficient way to produce electricity. 

Prof. Horst-Joachim Lüdecke concludes that wind energy is leading us “back to the Middle Ages.”

Lüdecke argues that human progress has always depended on continuously increasing the available power and energy density. This historical progression began in agriculture with draft animals, moved to medieval windmills and waterwheels, advanced to the steam engine and combustion engines, and culminated in modern coal and nuclear power plants.

According to Lüdecke, never before in human history has a society shifted on a large scale to a method that is backward-looking and yields a lower power density than already established technologies. Because wind turbines have an extremely low power density (averaging only about 3.6 watts per square meter annually and locally, compared to approximately 7,000 watts for coal plants), he views their large-scale expansion as a technological regression.

Lüdecke emphasizes that wind turbines suffer from fundamental flaws based on the laws of nature that cannot be fixed. In addition to their extreme dependence on the weather (“volatile power”), this includes the physical law stating that a wind turbine’s power output is proportional to the cube of the wind speed, If the wind speed drops by half, the power output plummets to just one-eighth (12.5%).

In summary, he views the attempt to power Germany primarily with wind and solar energy as a politically forced effort to return to an unreliable, medieval method of energy generation, thereby ignoring the historical principle of energetic progress,

The full video with all details can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7–0wDSfP-