Further proof that they are a danger,a waste of taxpayers money, etc, etc.... Only put up to appease a few people, and enrich more fortunate others. By now, quite a few of those contraptions, have collapsed under the strain of their own weight, strenght of the variable winds, early fatigue, and whathaveyou.... And we, the tax paying public are taxed extra so that the various conpanies involved in building and running the turbines, can do so with a hefty subsidy... And in many instances, they get paid for NOT producing electricity...
Dom, like them or not we need them, we need every type of renewable and we also need coal and gas and nuclear. Everything good about the modern world results from conversion of energy from one form to another, absolutely everything. Without energy there quite simply would not be 7 billion people on the planet, vast numbers of them would already be dead because we would not have had the energy intensive processing technologies for fertilisers (one simple example there are many), we have only staved off all the possible Malthusian Catastrophes that could have happened so far and the only reason we have staved off those catastrophes is because we had vast amounts of energy resources. I read about this incident yesterday this turbine appears to have suffered a failure in the breaking system, it has not collapsed under it's own weight as a result of poor design or specification, it has suffered a control system failure that likely caused bearing failure then resulting in a considerable moment of inertia being applied to the supporting structure. In other words the blades started spinning off axis and bent the pole that supported them to the point where the blades hit the ground and released all the kinetic energy stored in them. Storage, ok storage is an issue for all renewable's however we already use hydro electric installations as batteries for unused base load and molten salt batteries will within a few years start to provide proper additional alternative storage for the worlds grids, another promising storage technology is high pressure air CAES systems. These machines are generally pretty robust this one in Orkney near where my daughters mum lives was struck by lightning multiple times recently I think Shona said it was hit about 8 times eventually.
Oddly even as a landscape photographer I rather think they are quite pretty, power pylon's are far more ugly to my eye
They installed about ten on the moors close to where I used to live, even though they were about ten miles away they appeared to be just behind the houses across from me, I always think of the Telly Tubbies when I see them. The thing with electrical pylons is that they are actually required and useful and the routes they follow probably cannot be avoided in a lot of cases. I agree with wind farms out at sea, but even some of those are slightly, the ones off the coast of North Wales spring to mind.
Power lines are overhead because it's cheaper, underground cables would cost an absolute fortune, the statement that pylons are functional and needed and the implication therefore that wind turbines are not needed is curious. Losses on the grid are substantial, local power generation is far more efficient, you could argue that local generation via micro power stations would be more resource efficient than having the country covered in metal towers. edit: by 'micro power stations' I mean things like wind turbines, and in future combined with the energy storage technologies I mentioned earlier.
The UK Government is at least cutting subsidies to onshore wind farms and turning its attention to offshore installations. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-25210963
I was told by a German engineer 5 years ago here in the Philippines that Germany would be Nuclear, power free by 2025 because of their huge Solar power technology gains. Who won the war again? Germany’s solar power plants produced a record 22 gigawatts of energy on Friday, equivalent to the output of 20 nuclear plants. The country is already a world-leader in solar power and hopes to be free of nuclear energy by 2022. The director of the Institute of the Renewable Energy Industry (IWR) in Muenster, northeast Germany, said the solar power delivered to the national grid on Saturday met 50 per cent of the nation’s energy quota. "Never before anywhere has a country produced as much photovoltaic electricity. Germany came close to the 20 gigawatt (GW) mark a few times in recent weeks. But this was the first time we made it over,"Norbert Allnoch told Reuters news agency. The German government decided to turn its back on nuclear energy last year after the Fukushima disaster and plans to be nuclear-free by 2022. Going nuclear-free: Germany smashes solar power world record http://rt.com/news/solar-energy-record-break-332/
Solar power theoretically should be the way to go to satisfy our power supply needs, although I guess the initial financial outlay for equipment to harness the sun rays is enormous and restricts some of the poorer countries with year round sunshine from taking it up.
A Spanish chap called Don Quixote had a negative fixation on windmills. Slightly different element to the thread, Oss. I watched a good program on TV last night, on the moon. There was a guy on there recommending that the moon should be used as a solar powered launch pad for further exploration of the solar system. He said the moon was perfect for harnassing solar power. And "beaming" that power back to earth is another possibility. According to the "Diane Abbot" lookalike space scientist that fronted the program, if all the oil majors set aside 2 years worth of exploration funds then this would finance the project. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-s...into-a-giant-solar-panel-station-8969866.html Back to the thread. I flew back from Manchester to IOM last week and had a birdseye view of the wind farm off the coast of Barrow. It's colossal.
That's my opinion too Dave, I can understand however people not wanting nuclear power due to the problem of getting rid of the waste and the accident aspect of course. But having our own nuclear power is better than relying on foreign countries like Russia for our power supplies, we should be self sufficient in that respect as our power suppliers may become our enemies one day.
If you had a look at the wind farm off the coast of North Wales, between Rhyl and Llandudno you would be scared by the sheer amount of the unsightly things, with more and more getting put up all the time. There are two now, very close to each other, and as one drives along the A55, they don't seem to be 10 and 7/8, respectively miles offshore, as stated, but a hell of a lot closer....
So, with all these slightly wind turbines, when do we see our electricity bills going down? When nelson gets his eye back?
I saw them being built, from one of the rigs offshore. However, I have passed them going back and fourth on the ferry. The patch of turbines off Barrow looks bigger.
Yes very apt, by cutting off their nuclear options they are facing power cuts this winter as stated in the article. I expect Germany is extremely interested right now in the storage technologies I mentioned earlier, just as good for solar as for wind or wave. We need all the options, no single power technology will be our saviour, you simply cannot have the technological civilisation you have now without vast amounts of power. Burn carbon and one day you will run out simple as that, you don't even need to care about the climate arguments to see that the carbon will run out and long before it runs out it will be rationed and the technological economic system of the world will be in crisis. And nuclear will not save us either as the current crappy designs take 10 years to implement and for the most part in Europe it is too late to fill the base load energy gap.
