Not only does the BBC have its brilliant Verify team with its world-leading fact-checking, but it can also understand why President Trump chooses to use the language that he does. In a sarcastic hit piece which was rushed out following the Donald’s criticism of “windmills” it told us that:
For clarity, there are no windmills in the North Sea.
Windmills mill grain into flour. What he’s seeing are wind turbines.
But making them sound like centuries old technology is a way to deride their worth.
As it happens, I share the BBC’s dislike of the mis-labelling of wind turbines as windmills, but for rather different reasons (although I agree that as they do not mill anything, they should not be called windmills). I am every bit as cynical as the BBC journalists who wrote that piece, but my cynicism sees things differently. I tend to assume that the people who refer to wind turbines as windmills are generally enthusiasts for the technology, and they prefer to describe them in this way because it makes them sound less industrial, more bucolic, and as though they fit in with the landscape. The reality, of course, is that they are getting ever taller, reaching heights of 250 metres, and before long they will probably be as tall as the Shard or the Eiffel Tower. And President Trump is correct – they do kill birds. In very large numbers. SSE’s own environmental impact assessment assumes that over the planned 35 year life of the newly-approved Berwick Bank offshore wind farm, it will kill 31,000 seabirds.
Speaking of Berwick Bank, here is Stephen Flynn MP declaring that the Berwick Bank approval is “Big news for all us windmill fanatics”. I suppose it’s possible that his use of the word windmills is a tongue-in-cheek pop at President Trump, or perhaps he thinks the use of the word makes the bird-mincers sound nicer?
When Andrew Kersley, a freelance journalist who writes, inter alia, for the Guardian, referred to “a new generation of floating windmills” in a 2020 article in Labour List, was he “deriding their worth”?
Similarly, when Boris Johnson (remember the “Saudi Arabia of Wind” claims?) said “...we will build windmills that float on the sea – enough to deliver one gigawatt of energy by 2030, 15 times as much as the rest of the world put together…” I suppose he was deriding the technology too.
When Ecotricity publicised exports by its Britwind subsidiary, it wrote:
Britain’s greenest energy company, Ecotricity, has sold more than £1 million of small windmills to Japan through its Britwind subsidiary, to become the country’s leading small wind exporter.
Britwind launched in November 2014, producing windmills that are designed and made in Britain and has now shipped 130 small 5kW wind turbines to Japan in the past 18 months, with a further 30 windmills set to be dispatched by the end of March – an order totalling more than £1.3 million.
This latest shipment will include the very first of Britwind’s new H15 windmills – a 15kW machine that can power the equivalent of 13 homes.
Deriding their worth?
A couple more, just to make the point – Lord Deben (he of the Climate Change Committee) on 23rd July 2013, during the 7th Day of the Committee stage of the Energy Bill, Lord Deben said: “Manifestly, in the long-distant future, it would be quite sensible to have a lot of windmills when there was wind and a lot of solar when there was sun.” Yes, that sounds like he’s denigrating turbines. Similarly Lord Rooker, speaking in a House of Lords debate on 18th September 2023, said “I find the windmills magnificent, whether they are in the Lake District, Cornwall or anywhere else…”. And yes, he was referring to wind turbines, not to actual mills.
In other words, BBC, please don’t presume to read the mind of President Trump when you choose to question his motivation. I suggest you stick to reporting facts instead.
Postscript
While I’m being grumpy about the BBC, I thought I would mention that on the BBC Radio 4 weather forecast earlier this evening, I was told that the upcoming “Storm Floris” is what we get in winter, not in summer. I can’t read Tomasz Schafernaker’s mind any more than the BBC can read President Trump’s, but I was left with the distinct impression that I was supposed to assume that this is another terrible example of anthropogenic climate change in action. That is a view reinforced by the BBC website article whose headline told me that “Storm Floris [is] to bring ‘unseasonably disruptive’ rain and wind to UK”.
As it happens, I am currently reading Stephen Church’s excellent “King John – England, Magna Carta and the Making of a Tyrant”. Referring to what was a disastrous year for King John, he says this of the summer of 1205:
At the end end of July, England was battered by hurricane-force winds and huge thunderstorms; to many this presaged the Day of Judgement.”
Today, I have little doubt, they would rush out a weather attribution study and solemnly assure us that it’s all our fault – anthropogenic climate change and all that. I’m not entirely sure they would say it presaged the Day of Judgement, but give it time.
Climate Scepticism 
As so often, Simon Jenkins at the Guardian is a rare voice of common sense:
“He may talk rubbish but Trump has an eye for beauty, and that is a breath of fresh air”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/01/donald-trump-beauty-wind-turbines-natural-landscape
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I’m of the opinion that renewables fantasists/fanatics actually prefer the correct term, wind turbines, because it lends credence to their new ‘technological’ solution to climate change. They hate it when you remind them that wind driven blade power is medieval technology and that even the dynamos which convert rotational kinetic energy into electricity were developed in the 19th century, so wind farms are hardly ‘high tech’. I know for a fact that the term windmills irritates the hell out of many renewables enthusiasts and this is precisely why I use it, in order to wind them up! Nobody trolls like Trump trolls and I think this is why he uses the term windmills too. Another instance of him living rent free inside the heads of the left.
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Nice windmill quote archaeology.
President Trump uses the word windmill as a derogatory term, quite rightly as modern wind turbines are an economic and ecological disaster: expensive, only commercially viable by being granted never-justified massive taxpayer-funded subsidies, short lifespan exacerbating capital costs, resource depleting and not at all “green” (dependency on rare earth minerals, etc), un-recyclable toxic carbon fibre blades and concrete and steel foundations, landscape and seascape despoiling including all the pylons, death-dealing to birds, bats and whales, intermittent and wholly dependent on duplicate supplies from fossil fuels (including Drax biomass) for grid backup and balancing, unstable due to lack of inherent inertia (ref. the recent pan-Iberian power blackout) and totally incompatible with the way the national grid was designed to operate.
In just a few words of supposed justification for the approval of the Berwick “world’s largest offshore wind farm” subsequent to Trump’s admonition about wind power being a “con job”, SNP idiot John Swinney summed up the lunacy of his thinking with: “I am a believer in climate change”.
What an absurd statement given that the climate has always changed and always will. What he means of course is that he believes in alleged man-made CO2 global warming, a fake hypothesis which many honest independent scientists have proved to be of negligible threat to the climate.
Even if the fake hypothesis were true, which it isn’t, it is obvious to anyone with more than two brain cells that unilateral UK Net Zero will make negligible difference to the global climate but will almost certainly ruin the UK. Swinney is either mad (short of brain cells) or bad (a puppet for the globalists who want to destroy us). Maybe a bit of both.
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I refer to windmills to imply that they are not fit for purpose, like superseded technology. Wind droughts render the wind and solar system not fit for purpose to provide constant power for a modern civilization.
Great ingenuity and massive expenditure are being applied to prop up the grids that are contaminated by intermittent energy but it will not work, any more than improvements to steam engines will enable them to drive a rocket to the moon.
Trillions of dollars have been spent around the world rolling out unreliable energy generators and in return we have more expensive and less reliable power with catastrophic environmental impacts.
The elephant in the net zero room is the wind droughts or dunkelflautes that Australian investigators documented over a decade ago.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/the-late-discovery-of-wind-droughts
Dirt farmers are alert to the threat of rain droughts, but the wind farmers never checked the reliability of the wind supply to become aware of wind droughts, wind lulls, known as Dunkelflautes in Europe.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/we-have-to-talk-about-wind-droughts
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Testing
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Errr, President Trump is NOT the only person to call these things Windmills.
see below-
Why Britain can never rely on wind power
POSTED ON 11 JUN 18BY PAUL MATTHEWSIN UNCATEGORIZED1 MINUTE READ
Andrew Montford has a new article in the Spectator, on wind power and the possibility of small-scale nuclear reactors:Why Britain can never rely on wind power
For the last ten days or more the UK has been becalmed. In theory, our windmill fleet should be able to generate 20 megawatts of power, more than 50 percent of peak demand at this time of year, but with barely a puff of wind this month, it has been generating next to nothing. If the weather forecasters are right, the lull will not end for a few more days yet. We should be thanking our lucky stars that we still have fossil fuels and nuclear to keep the lights on.
It’s hard to think of a better demonstration of the absurdity of windmills as a way of powering a modern economy. Despite this, Lord Deben, the former John Selwyn Gummer and current chairman of the Committee on Climate Change, has taken to the pages of the Guardian today to argue for more wind power, and in particular, onshore wind power…
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Thanks for the comments – valid points all. My article was very tongue-in-cheek. I think there are three reasons why people use the term “windmills”.
First, simple ignorance.
Second, the reasons stated in the comments above (and by the BBC), namely to denigrate the technology.
Third, the reason used by some supporters, and which I speculated in the article, namely to make them sound more bucolic and appropriate in the countryside, rather than acknowledging that that they are huge-scale nature-destroying industrial developments that are completely out of place in most of the locations where they are situated.
I was moved to write it, not so much because the BBC reporters were wrong in the motivation they attributed to Trump, but because of the sneery know-it-all tone they adopted.
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“Miliband refuses to publish details of green energy deal with China”
This is from the “Clean, homegrown energy that we control” department.
“Mineral intensive, Chinese-manufactured energy that spies on us” might be a better way for Miliband to describe it.
Telegraph link.
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Found this interesting article – 19 Interesting Dutch Windmill Facts (Fully Explained) – AboutTheNetherlands
Won’t bore readers with to many quotes, so just some headers –
1. The first Dutch windmill was built in 1221
2. The Dutch were not the first to build windmills
3. Windmills were originally used to grind grains
4. Windmills in the Netherlands were used to reclaim land
9. The Netherlands also has a lot of modern windmills – Although the historical windmills are the most iconic, the Netherlands also has many modern ones. When driving around the country, it is almost impossible not to see one. Although there is quite some controversy regarding them, they are quite popular. They are placed on land, but there are also a lot of windmills in the North Sea.
10. The highest windmill in the world is built in the Netherlands – Although this is a modern windmill, it is absolutely massive. This machine is almost 245 meters (803 ft) high! This huge thing was built by the American multinational company General Electric in the harbor of Rotterdam. It was built as a test that, if successful, allows the company to build even higher windmills in the future. To put the sheer size of this enormous rotating tower of steel into perspective, let’s compare the size of a few parts. Each of the blades is 100 meters (328 ft) long, which is about as long as a football field. The tower is higher than the Big Ben, the Tower of Pisa, and the Arc de Triomphe stacked on each other. The turbine produces 12 mw, which is enough to power 16,000 European households! This thing clearly means business.
The testing period started in 2019 and would last for 5 years, meaning the machine will be removed in 2024. If all the tests end up being successful, we might see wind farms fully consisting of these giants being built, which could provide energy for up to one million households.
16. Some of the historic windmills are still being used for drainage – Many technological advancements have been made in the past few centuries. The world is not the same as it was when most historic windmills were built. But despite that, some of the old windmills still function. Many newer, more efficient ways to grind grain and saw wood have been invented, but some of the old windmills still remain very efficient at draining polders. Quite some of them still play a central role in keeping the Netherlands dry.
I only quote this long comment because it seems “the BBC have its brilliant Verify team with its world-leading fact-checking,” missing the fact that they have been used for centuries for other things than “Windmills mill grain into flour. What he’s seeing are wind turbines.“.
Poor, lazy, biased reporting/verifying. No wonder Trump bans certain news orgs from his briefings.
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dfhunter: #10 caught my eye wrt size and capacity, then I checked the date of the article: 2021. I’ve read that the Chinese have designs with capacities in the 20 – 22 MW range.
Also GE appear to be in trouble with that 12 MW design, according to comments on progress of the Dogger Bank project.
Lastly, we all know about the poor capacity factors of wind but there’s another parameter which is rarely mentioned: maximum output. We have approx 32 GW of wind power, on- and off-shore. The best ever performance, for a short time one day earlier this year, was close to 22 GW. So the most we can ever expect to get from our wind fleet is less than two thirds of the nameplate capacity. My bet is that fraction will diminish as the machines age, new projects are located in less favourable places and wake shadows become more prevalent.
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My diary tells me that exactly ten years ago today it was “extremely windy and autumnal“. Which fact doesn’t exactly disprove AGW, but it does suggest that today’s weather isn’t especially unusual at this time of year.
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How appropriate NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT is the name of Paul’s blog.
Bet no UK news/media channel weather presenters will bother to inform/educate viewers that this has happened many times in the recent past. The BBC news asked Justin Rowland if this was related to climate change & he said something like “no, this storm can not at the moment be linked to that, but as the sea & air temps rise we can expect more storms like this”.
Could not find a link to his exact reply, but found this – Storm Floris batters UK with winds over 80mph – BBC News
Just read this partial quote & note “Named” & “notable August storms” –
“Named storms in August are not that rare, with five taking place since 2020.
Last year, Storm Lilian struck the UK on 23 August just before the bank holiday weekend, closing stages at the Leeds Festival and cancelling Heathrow flights. Storms Antoni and Betty brought disruption in 2023, while storms Ellen and Francis in 2020 were described as “two of the most notable August storms in the last 50 years” by the Met Office. These two storms brought wind gusts of 79mph and 81mph respectively with transport disruption, coastal flooding and power cuts.
The storm follows the UK’s fifth warmest July on record, according to provisional figures from the Met Office. All four UK nations recorded one of their 10 warmest Julys, and July was the sixth consecutive month of above-average mean temperatures for the UK, the Met Office said.
The first day of the month brought the highest temperature of the year so far, with 35.8C in Faversham, Kent.”
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I remember a commenter at WUWT disliking the term “wind turbines”, because they don’t have turbines. They have generators.
I’ve often used “windmills” instead of “wind turbines” to save a couple keystrokes which can actually make a difference when you’re trying to fit a bunch of stuff into a tweet.
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Massive industrial edifices devastating hundreds of acres of our wild places might be more accurate, but isn’t exactly short and simple. 😊
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Fact checkers don’t seem to have a problem with approving promotional propaganda like ‘enough to power 16,000 European households’ without the rider ‘sometimes, and none at other times’.
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