PM's windy rhetoric denounced as a scare tactic -

A SCIENTIST has accused the Prime Minister of frightening the public to undermine wind power's potential.
Responding last week to a Herald/ACNielsen poll showing 91 per cent of people regarded climate change as serious, John Howard warned that wind power could become a key source of energy only if the coast was festooned with windmills.
"Unless you want to have a windmill every few hundred feet starting at South Head and going down to Malabar," he said, "you simply won't be able to generate enough power from something like wind in order to take the load of the power that is generated by the use of coal and gas and, in time, I believe, nuclear."
Looking "years ahead", the only means of generating the required energy were fossil fuels and nuclear power.
However, Mark Diesendorf, an expert in renewable energy at the Institute of Environmental Studies, University of NSW, dismissed Mr Howard's comments as "just not true".
He said the depiction of a coastline of windmills was "a straw man … designed to frighten people … It's the same old misleading stuff."
The truth, Dr Diesendorf said, was that wind farms could supply 20 per cent of Australia's energy needs by 2040, using less land than required today for generating coal-fired power.
And no one was proposing dotting the coast with wind farms. In NSW, the most likely sites would be inland, "in high country on the Southern Tablelands".
Only "1 or 2 per cent" of a wind farm would be covered with turbines and associated works, such as access roads. The rest would remain available for agriculture, including grazing.
Dr Diesendorf said the turbines and roads for a wind farm that could replace a 1000-megawatt coal-fired station would occupy between five and 19 square kilometres. An open-cut coalmine to support a station producing the same amount of power could take up 50 to 100 square kilometres.
Dr Diesendorf said Mr Howard's comments followed equally misleading claims by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer, in May. "It has been estimated," Mr Downer told Parliament, "that you would need a wind farm occupying 3200 square kilometres to produce the equivalent energy of a medium-sized power station."
A 2004 study, Clean Energy Future for Australia, found carbon dioxide emissions from stationary sources could be halved by 2040 with existing technology. Natural gas, the cleanest fossil fuel, could supply 30 per cent of power, said Dr Diesendorf, who worked on the study.
Small "bioenergy" power stations burning crop leftovers could supply 28 to 30 per cent, and wind power another 20 per cent.