Posted on 07/14/2009 7:17:21 AM PDT by thinking
Let us be clear: Britain is facing an unprecedented crisis. Before long, we will lose 40 per cent of our generating capacity.
And unless we come up quickly with an alternative, the lights WILL go out. Not before time, the Confederation of British Industry yesterday waded in, warning the Government it must abandon its crazy fixation with wind turbines as a way of plugging this forthcoming shortfall and instead urgently focus on far more efficient ways to meet the threat of a permanent, nationwide black-out.
There are a few contenders for the title of the maddest thing that has happened in our lifetime.
But a front-runner must be the way in which politicians of all parties have been seduced by the La-La Land promises of the wind power lobby.
If you still haven't made your mind up about wind power, just consider some of the inescapable facts - facts which the Government and the wind industry do their best to hide from us all.
So far we have spent billions of pounds on building just over 2,000 wind turbines - and yet they contribute barely one per cent of all the electricity that we need.
The combined output of all those 2,000 turbines put together, averaging 700 megawatts, is less than that of a single, medium-sized conventional power station.
What's more, far from being 'free', this pitiful dribble of electricity is twice as expensive as the power we get from the nuclear, gas or coal-fired power stations which currently supply well over 90 per cent of our needs - and we all pay the difference, without knowing it, through our electricity bills.
But despite its best efforts to conceal the fact that wind turbines expensively and unreliably generate only a derisory amount of electricity, the Government keeps ....
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Governments aren’t stupid (although the GOP is), they know what they’re doing.
Creating shortages is the goal. Destroying the “fossil fuel” industry is the goal. Enriching their “environmentalist” supporters, at the expense of ordinary people, is the goal.
Wind turbines—the New Lightrail Trains.
Wind and solar both have their place in the grand scheme of things. Advanced energy storage techniques will make them both profitable in the long run. However, nuclear fission power should still be considered the state of the art for baseload until we have cracked the nut that is fusion. “Spinning reserve” and peak load will continue to be fulfilled by nat gas, oil and coal plants for the near future.
Light rail also has its place when properly designed. But most of the systems in the US have been VERY poorly designed and therefore have low ridership. This means they become boondoggles.
In Central Illinois, there is a huge wind farm with over 500 large windmills. The few times I’ve gone past them, no more than one out of every ten or twelve are even moving. Don’t ask me why. You would think basically all would move a little if one did.
They look bad and are the biggest waste of tax dollars I’ve ever seen in a country setting.
Gotta agree with the “GOP is stupid” idea.
Virtually none of the green idiot ideas can withstand even the most simple back of the envelop math analysis, and we expect the dim-bulb-crats to pursue it anyway.
However, I do NOT expect repubs to do so.
Methinks a serious foray into building wind farms as a viable alternative power source - and I mean hundreds of gigawatts of power production - will have such an environmental impact that those who insisted on their use will insist on their dismantling.
100GW, enough to power England, would require a quarter-million turbines. Optimistically assuming 100 turbines per square kilometer (probably much fewer), that’s close to 3000 sq km, or 2% of England’s surface.
The reality is, at least here in the western US, that wind farms are draining the grid almost as much as they add to it. In order to maintain them in sync with the grid, when the wind is not blowing they are drawing power to keep a minimum threshold so that when the wind does blow they come up on the grid in sync.
In addition, in certain areas of the Cascades, where they are putting these wind farms up on forested ridges, they are clear cutting forest (but what about the spotted owl?) in order to improve wind flow to the units. In one case for Rocky Mountain Power this involved clear cutting 14,000 acres.
These things are being heavily subsdidized. They are not going to be profitable in the forseeable future.
It's not about profits and its not about more power. It's about transformation, regulation, and control.
agree
What’s never said about these ‘wind farms’ is what a devastatingly ugly impact they have on the landscape they occupy. The same environmental fruitcakes who would scream if someone relocated a single tree from an area, give their full approval to a thousand stupid-looking structures destroying the view for as far as the eye can see. What a joke.
Dutch tulip economy.
It still makes more sense than ethanol... (which is saying less than none...)
The liberal obsession with windmills is, dare I say, quixotic.
The irony... the windmills have to be lubed with OIL !
Driving into Palm Springs from the west is a monumental eyesore.
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