On the Mercury Energy website they dedicate one page to “Energy Education”. “Helping kids learn about energy”. I came across the site because I noticed that recent price rises in energy were justified by the company as being needed to pay for new generating sources. I wondered how much Mercury was spending on the idiot idea of windmills. I’m going to put this aside and deal with the pack of distortions and omissions and half truths that make up Mercury’s attempts to brainwash children about energy. If what is on their site reflects what is being taught to NZ in government schools its a double disgrace.

Here’s the most contentious claim-

“Wind power is produced by the wind turning a turbine. Wind power, through using windmills, has been known for many centuries. This source of energy produces almost no pollution. ”

An article in today’s Mail Online begs to differ. On the outskirts of one of China’s most polluted cities, an old farmer stares despairingly out across an immense lake of bubbling toxic waste covered in black dust. He remembers it as fields of wheat and corn. [..] The reality is that, as Britain flaunts its environmental credentials by speckling its coastlines and unspoiled moors and mountains with thousands of wind turbines, it is contributing to a vast man-made lake of poison in northern China. This is the deadly and sinister side of the massively profitable rare-earths industry that the ‘green’ companies profiting from the demand for wind turbines would prefer you knew nothing about.

Rusting pipelines meander for miles from factories processing rare earths in Baotou out to the man-made lake where, mixed with water, the foul-smelling radioactive waste from this industrial process is pumped day after day. No signposts and no paved roads lead here, and as we approach security guards shoo us away and tail us. When we finally break through the cordon and climb sand dunes to reach its brim, an apocalyptic sight greets us: a giant, secret toxic dump, made bigger by every wind turbine we build.

Windmills cause other environmental damge through the roads needed to service them and the huge concrete foundations needed to support them. Drained peat moors are reducing huge amounts of carbon that would otherwise remain locked in the ground.

There’s much more. The claim that windmills produce “almost no pollution” is manifest nonsense, and Mercury Energy needs to start telling kids the truth.

Mercury Energy.

Mail Online.