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 examined the energy efficiency of wind turbines and found that they are terribly inefficient at producing electricity. [some emphasis, links added]
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 such a large scale to a backward-looking method that 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 with 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”), including the physical law that states 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 energy progress.
The full video with all details can be found here.
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