The Albany Wind Farm (AWF) on the south coast of Western Australia was commissioned in 2001 and at the time there was a blizzard of publicity including TV adverts with a young girl claiming that the facility would supply 75% of electric power for Albany.

I thought this sounded optimistic and emailed Western Power asking if they could supply monthly operating statistics. It took a while to get a reply but in September 2002 a representative of the operating company replied that the information was commercially sensitive and would not be available but that they had experienced less wind than normal in the winter of 2002.

Western Power annual reports carry a figure for the total energy produced by the AWF and for the years 2002, 2003, 2005 & 2006, this averages 61GWh (Giga watt hours). The WP annual report for 2004 has not been found yet.
When built a claim of 77GWh was made, so we see reported annual energy generation averages only 79% of that claimed.
We are interested now to see if it is possible to discover the true effectiveness of this reported 61GWh per year. How much grid energy is the AWF truly displacing. Our other interest is to get the most accurate understanding of the true cost of wind energy and the scale of the wastage of taxpayers dollars.

J.A.Halkema is a Dutch expert on electricity generation and wind energy and he has written a report, “Wind Energy: Facts and Fiction; A half truth is a whole lie”, which is available at,
www.countryguardian.net/
This report lays to rest many of the Green myths about wind power and details the limitations of this method of generating electricity for wide area commercial power grids.