Call for views on wind farm plan

“ItIsntBristol,

They generate a great deal of money from wind turbines. That one by the M$ towards London that I have yet to see going round generated electricity worth £100K and subsidies worth £140K one year, according to a Telegraph article that I will try to find. I will also try to find the a Dutch academic study that found that the saving in carbon dioxide achieved by wind turbines amounts to about 4% of the claimed savings, and that when wind forms 20% of the power mix, the saving slides below zero.

These things are the biggest lie ever told. No power station has ever been closed because of windfarms, and never will be. Think back to the long bitter cold winter of 2010/11, when the temperature stayed below zero, and snow stayed on the ground for weeks. Then, we used massive amounts of electricity. But the cold weatehr stayed because the wind did not blow.

I could tell you what time the tide will come in, and how high it will be, on any day in the year 2212. I can't tell you if the wind will be blowing in the next ten minutes. Wind is capricious, and every watt of claimed "installed capacity" needs a real power station backing it up. You can't stoke a nuclear power station up in 30 seconds, nor a coal-fired one. So nuclear and coal form a large part of the "base load" - the minimum electricity this country need to do nothing. They work best at full power permanently. If the windmills produce more than is needed to make up the balance, the grid pays them to shut down. If not, gas is the fuel of choice - gas power stations come on line more quickly than anything but hydro, something we don't have a lot of. But ramping them up and down reduces their efficiency hugely. The country with the most windpower in Europe per capita is Denmark. The country with the highest electricity bills in Europe is Denmark. Coincidence?

So why does the government stagger slavishly along with wind? The previous administration was in thrall to these largely foreign Johnnies, wanting to look green, and not wanting to admit that a lot of coal and nuclear power stations were coming to the end of their lives, and they had done too little too late to replace them. The senior part of the coalition saw money to be made from feed-in tariffs, and the junior party in the coalition had their minds made up for them at their party conferences by the Men In Sandals. Now, the Chairman of the Committee on Climate Change is Lord Deben, late John Gummer, the chairman also of Forewind, a consortium looking to take more tax money off you and me by building a huge offshore farm in the North Sea. He doesn't do it for fun, he is paid several times my annual income to do this. Conflict of interest? No more than having Gary Glitter on the committee for child protection.
Tim Yeo, the current chairman of the Commons Select committee on Energy and Climate Change declares interests in several renewable energy firms in the commons register. Conflict of interest?
Nick Clegg's missus is a director of Acciona, a Spanish company whose interests include renewable energy. Conflict of interest? No, she isn't in government.
And Dave Cameron's father in law, Lord Astor, trousers over £1.5 million a year from turbines on his land - see http://tinyurl.com/2vhkk2o Conflict of interest? Doubt it.
Before the next election, I expect to see some hedging of bets, with people with a big financial interest in wind farms moving into tidal and nuclear, maybe even shale gas. They won't want to be caught with the costs of removing the rusting hulks of unwanted broken windmills in 10 years time, when the bubble bursts.

My tip for the future? Thorium. Nuclear, but with much less baggage than uranium. Check it out. Thanks for reading.”

“@ItIsntBristol
Yes not enough to cover the price of these things they just dont make that much money”

“Just to add to to that....

Reply received from REG – makes it all much clearer.

The output should have been in Gigawatt-hours, as we thought. Their apologies for that, and the website will be corrected.

The community benefit is based on the rated size of the turbines, currently projected to be 1.8Mw apiece.

The 3,600 homes stat is based on projected wind farm energy output and recent average domestic consumption in South Glos (figures for all authorities at http://tinyurl.com/bvbgjxy )

Hope that helps.

My conclusions remain the same. Go for it!”

“BCFCfinker:

Thanks for that link. Good old Wikipedia!

I've no problem with your calculations – but I'm still doubtful about the raw materials! I've just written to REG to point out the problems.

They're doing themselves no favours – for instance the energy they expect to generate would probably power many more 'average' homes than the 3600 'medium sized' homes they claim. And they could have been much clearer about the potential community benefits. I'm just thinking about what this ward could do with windfall sums like that.

Even so, the three turbines still look like a big benefit all round.”

“@stockwood_pete

I thought if you could sneak in the nuclear red-hearing (after all, we are talking about wind power and not nuclear), I could sneak in the stadium ;)

As to the GW per year, it is a nonsense isn't it. Ok, now I'll try and answer it seriously (my claims were complete and utter dross, and you're the only one who said anything).

Let's start with...
http://tinyurl.com/65pkwbs

Go to other related energy units. Let's assume that this is what they've ham-fistedly tried to do? I'm going to assume that they are on about kWh i.e. units
15.6GWh/year = 15 600 000kWh/year
The site suggests that 1kWh/year is equivalent to 0.11408W constantly through the year

So, power output from 3 turbines is 1.78MW
Or about 0-6MW per turbine.
This is the average output from their figures. They don't say what the power output should be.

I can't be sure that this is what they meant but I suppose if you put out some big sounding figure, they make their product sound good or in the vernacular of advertisers ... 9 out of 10 cats. And this is the point, someone is being a little bit naughty and not being clear about the figures. And you seem to concur i.e. """... except that the REG website should do better!"""

If I choose to, I could rip most of their (REG wind power) claims to bits. And if I was an objector to this wind farm, that's what I'd be doing (instead of '...it will make a lot of noise...') i.e. make REG wind powers claims look nonsense (no doubt that's what REG will be doing when it comes to countering the objectors claims).



As to your views on nuclear, this short piece probably sums up the endemic fear of green types:
http://tinyurl.com/d8yqkt8
Or in the words of Private James Frazer 'We're doomed'”

“BCFCfinker:
Lets leave the stadium/town green to when it's a news item, not a red herring.

My problem with the quoted figures was that they use non-existent measures – there's no such thing as 'gigawatts per year'. Gigawatts are a rate of energy flow, not a measure of total energy over a period. Gigawatts per year is like talking about miles per hour per day. You can't draw any conclusions from them, except that the REG website should do better!

When you and Green-man cross swords, I guess it's a question of who loses the will to live first! I'm not going to join in that one.... what I was referring to was the poison legacy that nuclear power leaves to successive future generations – they suffer the costs but get none of the benefits.”

“Just read norfolkboy14's comment.

Nor folkers should be allowed to stop this development with their flat-earth anti-wind-farm policies.”

“@stockwood_pete
I find some of your comments to be a tad ironic, considering your stance on the BCFC stadium. You seem quite dismissive in regards to the objectors concerns about this wind farm when it's something you appear to be passionate about.

I'm using the figures that REG wind power gave i.e. '15.80 gigawatts per year' and a 25 year lifetime. If they are wrong, I'd expect REG wind power to correct them. As they say, the silence is deafening.

BTW, I've seen the opposition (to the wind site) arguments and I don't think much of them either e.g. I agree with you, the motorway will probably make more noise than this wind farm.

As to your nuclear quip, well I've given green_man something to ponder here:
http://tinyurl.com/bwvfvhg
He choose not to respond.

Scratch the surface of green claims and you'll be surprised what you can find.”

“BCFCfinker:

Look at the map. Coastal plain. Use a bit of common for the wind speeds, or else check the wind speed maps (developers don't pick sites without thinking about that first). Ingst is no more than a hamlet, nearest village is Olveston, a mile or more away across the motorway. Their view of the turbines will be spoiled by the pylons in between.

No, I've no interest in any wind turbine developer, except to buy my electricity from Ecotricity and my ice-cream from Mackies!

The developer's website isn't all that clear about the generating capacity, so it's hard to be precise about the figures – but yours seem on the low side, I think you've overestimated the expected working life of the turbines. ( And once they're gone, you'd scarcely know they'd been there.... unlike a nuclear power station with its undying legacy of radioactive waste.)”

“by lolly60 Tuesday, September 04 2012, 4:43PM

"Not even worth it these wind farms you have to turn them off if it gets to windy ,frosty ,but still have to use electric to power them so thats a waste of time and money"

Are you saying that all of these energy companies that run these turbines don't generate electricity or money from them then?”