Vocal Voices

Todays Mail...
"Wind farms paid £30 million a year to stand idle.
Farmers paid £24,000 a year for every monstrosity they have erected on their land.
30 wind farms last week paid to switch off.
Thanks to Frank I learned some of the technicalities regarding the issues we face with them.. yoyu put the article on wind farms Telegraph that unfortunately I did not have chance to read so I would appreciate the address again please Frank.

It's crazy, isn't it - all or nothing. This is today's article from the Mail ...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... oduce.html

You'd have thought by now that they would have come up with a way for storing surplus generated electricity until needed - big batteries or something!

is jthis what you are looking for Kate?

I find a very interesting point here that nobody is making.

Renewables like Wind are build once and use/maintain for low cost. So, under that structure, any factory created to build wind turbines will shut as soon as all the volume wind turbines have been deployed. These jobs and factories are not "consumer" related. They are "single use". Once the job is done it's done.

We should be investing in jobs which self perpetuate. There are other ways to spend less and get more. As Frank, Cromwell and Ossie have all noted. There are plenty of rivers in the UK and turbines to gather that power and use it locally are viable, crate real local construction jobs for the infrastructure build and will work 24x7 except at very low water conditions.

The thing is a mess and needs to be revisited. Sadly Wind is easy. Find a bit of land, lay a few cables, stick up this tower which has a very small footprint, if a very large visual impact ton the environment, then just take the money..... Also 90% of the construction for wind turbines can be done off site.....

On one of the climate sites I visit I postulated that we could use tidal rise fall to replace the entire baseload power of the UK. Massive construction, something we used to excel at, totally clean, totally offshore, even over the horizon, viable 24x7 and with the tidal range round the UK, always having power when needed in the grid. Implementation could be incremental and we could wind up with cheap everlasting power in the UK, for the cost of maintenance of the infrastructure.

The answer?

It's quicker and cheaper to put up a few wind farms.....


Yeah. Right....

The whole subject of energy frustrates the hell out of me.

Successive governments have taken an "all eggs in one basket" approach with wind. In order to get the turbines up and running the energy producers had to be given payment guarantees, that's why these payments were made - the wind blew at the wrong time and the grid couldn't cope. There are other times when the wind doesn't blow..... and we still pay. Whatever technology we use for electrical energy we always need to meet a baseload and then balance it.

Neither solar nor wind can meet those requirements, for fairly obvious reasons, even with storage technology introduced. That is not to say they are useless or unimportant: they are.

Small scale hydro is also not the answer. The land might be criss-crossed with water flowing 24/7 but there are not enough sites to cover baseload and certainly no political will to even promote them. They could, however, help with load balancing especially at the local level.

Coal is not going to be the way to go, for environmental reasons, especially CO2 emissions. Even with carbon capture - not as popular as it should be - it would break the UK's commitment to emissions reduction. We still need it though, and we should be building a limited number of modern and more efficient coal fired stations.

Gas, the wonderfuel, or maybe not. Once fracking starts in earnest it could turn out to be an environmental disaster on an unrecoverable scale. It could equally be our short-term saviour, note: short-term

We will not be going nuclear any time soon, certainly not with nuclear fission. The propaganda battle has been won. In the eyes of the general public nuclear power is uber dangerous - a no go area. No political party is going to get on its collective soapbox and shout out for it, it would be political suicide.

I guess the very large scale hydro system along that suggested by Suff will only come about with international co-operation. They will simply be too expensive in these austere times.

It worries me that Ofgen has been warning for a few years that we will, WILL, be having power cuts from 2015 onwards because we do not have the capacity to cover baseload, and yet there is no urgency whatsoever from government. Look around us, these islands have everything, and more, to be energy independent forever, but it will take a mix of many types of energy generation to do it.

Relying on only a few is a recipe for disaster. Windmills. Pah!!!

Such a folly of vast proportions that I have not got the time to waste to even think about them, as I told Cameron years ago when still worth writing to him.

I told Cameron the same thing when it was possible to talk to him. Now it's not so we're just wasting our time.

Already the government is talking up one of the benefits of leaving the EU being that we don't have to make these CO2 savings and don't have to invest in renewable energy. We can keep on burning coal and waste our money somewhere more popular....

Workingman wrote: Look around us, these islands have everything, and more, to be energy independent forever

And we still can't manage it! Unbelievable. If Salter's duck et al had been pursued in the 70's maybe we would be better off now.

When I was working I went to a small industrial unit in North Wales. The owner lived in a large house and the electricity for both the works and the house was generated by a small hydro electric generator run from a stream near the house. Had been installed many years and apart from regular maintenance had not given any problems.
There must be many other places were this could be done without affecting the local enviroment.
Have seen the salmon jumps at Pitlochory in Scotland at the side of the hydro electric generators. These don't seem to stop the salmon going upstream and defeats the argument put forward by the anti-lobby about this type of construction.

Most of these hydro generators don't need a dam. Then just need a weir. This is even easier for the fish and most of the weirs already exist as we have had water mills up and down the country for centuries.

It's more a matter of replacing existing water mills with power generators.

The main reason steam took over from water so quickly, in terms of manufacturing, was that steam was portable and factories could be located wherever was most desirable. OK there was the engineering and power angle but, mainly, it was about portability in manufacturing and transport. Had electricity been available in the late 1700's and electrical motors in use, I'm not so sure that steam would have taken over from water so quickly. After all for water the construction is the expensive part, running is essentially free outside of maintenance. It is exactly the opposite in steam and fuel oil solutions.

We should have built more nuclear power stations back in the 90s, when it was just about still feasible that it would get past the PC brigade - now it is too late, as has been said here already it would be political suicide as people have swallowed the propoganda .....so now we buy in power from abroad at hugely overhiked prices