Hmm, i live just 1 km away from the nearest wind turbine; we have ducks, hens, bees, people nearby have dogs and cats and we don't notice any ill effect of these turbines. There are plenty of wild animals around, mongooses, mice, birds, etc.
The wind doesn't stop at night!
Most large thermal power plants use steam or gas turbines which, AFAIK, can work at full power immediately after starting without any problems. Diesel and gas-engines generators can be also started and stopped at will. There's more wear when they are often cold-started, but it's not such a big problem.
This post signed Alan looks like complete bullshit to me.
Belief is a wonderful thing Iguana.
The wind does indeed 'not' normally make it to the earth at night. Yes it does sometimes and in some locales this may not be true but normally it doesn't. Close to the equator the air is rising and so there is very little wind period, low or high. I've seen it blowing 30 to 50 knots, even at 1000' AGL (350 M) (Above Ground Level) and zero on the ground more nights than I could tell you. It is very strange to be coming in to land (130 to 140 knots approach speed) with a crab of 30 degrees or more into the wind and a major headwind on final and just before touchdown the wind dies to nothing so you suddenly have to straighten out and add power to keep from slamming into the runway. In some locales on the ground, you can even hear the windshear which sounds like a distant roaring from up above. Windshear is the change in windspeed with altitude and is often used to determine where it will be bumpy by pilots, because where there is a stronger wind as you change altitude there is mixing and thus turbulence.
What I have noticed is that often when the wind is 'howling' meaning speeds in the Jetstream in excess of say 80 knots it is often practically dead on the ground.
The theory of why the wind dies at night that I was taught, which may have changed in the intervening years is that during the day the sun heats the earth causing the air next to it to warm up and thus become more viscous and have less mass or inertia, so it sticks to the earth less and can move more quickly and thus windy and also the wind is gusty because it is deflected by everything from trees to mountains to houses etc etc making it tumble.
Conversely in the nighttime the sun's heat is missing, so the air cools, becomes heavier, denser, more resistant to being moved and in essence sticks to the earth, thus no wind and it falls or settles.
Maybe where you are in France, the prevailing wind off of the ocean is incessant because there is less friction on the ocean and diurnal heating/cooling is less. Where I am next to the Pacific we have a mountain range between us and the prevailing westerlies, so the friction is again at work.
Meteorology is a huge topic that PPL spend a lifetime learning. Some books to read that are unusual but fascinating are written by an American hang glider pilot whose name escapes me but he wrote on micrometeorolgy, which is about the winds/air movement below 3000'or 1000 M to the surface.
Re starting and stopping powerstations, I was repeating what a number of electric engineers that ran diesel etc powerplants told me. When they run the powerplants at low speed they puff out a lot of smoke because they are not efficient at low speeds. Basically they would get complaints from the locals about the smoke dirtying the laundry on the clotheslines.
The turbines that I flew were basically damaged by starting and stopping them. This damage is essentially caused by the expanding and contracting of the vanes etc during the temperature changes of starting and stopping, causing the vanes to rub at the tips and stressing them with speed changes. Basically Pratt and Whitney once said to us on a training course, that someone had figured out that each startup caused (probably in today's prices) about 75+ dollars.
What I said about wind turbines being all over the place in regards to output was told to me by friends who did training at a large facility in the US where they trained on simulators. They complained about these wind turbines because at the time they said they were useless. You cannot have inconsistent power on a grid, plain and simple.
I recall discussions at the university where the electrical engineers were discussing the variable output of WT and things were discussed like doing what they were at the time planning in Iceland where they were planning to convert the electricity from the geothermal sites to produce hydrogen and running local cars on it.
There are maps of North America where the wind speeds are given and thus can guide planners to where the wind is most consistent and strong and when I was leaving work, they were constructing a lot of these windmills near the site I lived at, because they had the strongest most consistent winds in NA and it is basically uninhabited.
I heard of one scheme where they have basically a pipe that sticks up in the air and has a sort of drum spinning around it with vanes sticking out to make it spin, sort of like a squirrel cage air fan. I saw pics of it on a Popular Science cover being used on ships to assist to power them.
PPL will always be attracted to what seems like free electricity and will hope and dream that it will work but reality steps in.
