James McCanney, a physicist/inventor and host of a weekly radio show, James McCanney Science Hour – At the Crossroads, predicts that if the proposed $300-million Scout Clean Energy Nimbus Wind Facility is built south of Green Forest, it is going to leave the people in Arkansas with a mess.
“The whole idea of three-blade wind turbines is a giant scam,” McCanney said. “They don’t work. For example, if you go to Canada all around the Great Lakes, there are a large number of three-blade wind turbines that have been a failure. Like so many things, the news media blocks it out. It is really a corrupt industry. They don’t tell you that it takes electricity to get the wind turbines started. They are horrifically inefficient. The amount of power generated will never even pay construction costs.”
Scout has said that it has leases from landowners in the rural area of Carroll County south of Green Forest who are happy to be able to make revenue off their land by allowing construction of wind turbines to create green electricity.
McCanney said experience with similar projects in other areas of the country have shown that landowners who sign leases thinking they are going to make a lot of money often find out that they don’t make as much as anticipated, and their property values go down because of noise, visual blight, the flicker effect from blades and electromagnetic frequencies that some people believe can cause health problems for people, domestic animals and wildlife.
There can be damage from high winds or tornadoes, and from mechanical problems.
“These companies don’t have anything in place to take them down if there are failures,” McCanney said. “In one to three years, if they fail, who is going to take them down? The people who signed these leases have been conned. People’s land values will go through the basement. There will be a lot of disappointed lease holders, and a lot of disappointed neighbors. Something that high is also going to have a very negative impact on migratory birds.”
He also points out that wind is not steady; it is typically gusty. McCanney said on a windy day when production greatly increases, it puts a ripple of higher voltage out on the grid.
“They’re going to wreck everyone’s electronics,” McCanney said. “That is the problem they had in Australia. They had to install massive batteries to put on the grid to deal with the surge problems.”
Scout has said it wants to build 43 wind turbines that would produce 180 megawatts of power. McCanney said that is only if the turbines were generating 100 percent all the time—which they don’t.
“Typically, the industry standard is about 20 percent efficiency,” McCanney said. “Then you have all other kinds of problems. Recently they have been falling over.”
Scout has indicated that the Nimbus wind turbines could be from 500- to 650-feet tall. Tim Newcomb wrote an article in Popular Mechanics Jan. 23 that said the taller the wind turbines, the harder they fall. “And they sure are falling,” Newcomb said.
“Wind turbine failures are on the uptick, from Oklahoma to Sweden and Colorado to Germany, with all three of the major manufacturers admitting that the race to create bigger turbines has invited manufacturing issues, according to a report from Bloomberg,” Newcomb wrote. “Multiple turbines that are taller than 750 feet are collapsing across the world, with the tallest—784 feet in stature—falling in Germany in September 2021. To put it in perspective, those turbines are taller than both the Space Needle in Seattle and the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. Even smaller turbines that recently took a tumble in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Wales, and Colorado were about the height of the Statue of Liberty.”
Newcomb reported that turbines are falling for the three largest players in the industry: General Electric, Vestas, and Siemens Gamesa. “…The bigger the turbine, the more energy it can capture,” Newcomb said. “But the bigger the turbine, the more that can go wrong.”
McCanney said famous investor Warren Buffet doubled his wealth in a couple years by investing in three-blade wind turbines. But Buffett said the projects wouldn’t be profitable without tax incentives.
McCanney said what commonly happens is a company comes in to get the project up and running in order to get tax incentives, and then sells the turbines off to a third party. He said the deal is arranged so the purchasing party has none of the obligations of the initial developer. McCanney said that in most cases there are no provisions for dismantling the turbines at the end of their lifespan.
“The companies aren’t interested in selling electricity, but in big tax incentives from the federal government,” McCanney said.
McCanney has patented his own wind energy system called the JMCC WING Generator. He said with three-blade turbines, 95 percent of wind blows right through them. He said his WING system captures 95 percent of the wind and has 25 improvements over the three-blade turbines.
“It is extremely lightweight combined to three-blade wind turbine blades that can weigh up to 65 tons each,” he said. “The entire WING is extremely lightweight and very responsive to the wind. It is designed to rotate slowly. The three-blade wind turbines are not scalable to large power production. One of my core requirements when I designed the WING was that it could scale up to sizes that could replace nuclear and coal fired power plants.”
McCanney said the bigger they make three-blade wind turbines, the worse efficiency becomes because it is not a scalable design.
“It is a failed design that came from NASA,” he said. “In the 1990s, NASA was given a project to design a wind system that then could be passed off to industry. NASA built some small wind turbines that worked pretty well. GE and Seamans picked it up and never changed the design. They never questioned it and started building them larger and larger. When you do that, it doesn’t work.”
McCanney’s businesses are based in Wyoming. For more information, see jmccwing.com.