How much money will a turbine earn,
If a turbine could but turn?
Little more ‘earn’ than a turbine would,
When a turbine’s silent stood.*
Will they be teaching that little ditty to schoolchildren in 50 years time?
Britain could meet its climate change targets in 2020 for £45 billion less if it abandoned wind power in favour of gas power stations and nuclear. The saving would rise to £150 billion by 2050.
Is there any hope that the Green vote-buying aspirations of this government will stop before the entire country is a metallic forest of silent turbines remembering the days when Alexander Pope was moved to write ‘With joyful pride survey’st our lofty woods; Where tow’ring oaks their spreading honours rear’. Could anybody be persuaded to pen tear-jerking prose or poetry in praise of the Wind Turbine?
Mind you, who could forget Macheath’s memorable ‘Red Sky at night, turbine’s alight’ commemorating that joyous occasion when the Scottish turbines finally got enough wind to make a desultory turn or two and promptly burst into flames from the effort involved?
Today we learn from Matt Ridley in the Speccie: -
‘ I have it on good authority from a marine engineer that keeping wind turbines upright in the North Sea for 25 years is a near hopeless quest, so the repair bill is going to be horrific and the output disappointing. Already the grouting in the foundations of hundreds of turbines off Kent, Denmark and the Dogger Bank has failed, necessitating costly repairs’.
So not only the land, but also the seas that surround us will be a wasteland of barely remembered vote-bribers lying drunkenly face down like Cardiff sluts?
Billions – is it mere billions, or have we moved onto Trillions now? – are being spent on this EU political correctness of ‘wind power’. Fortunes are being made by a few – I understand the Prime Minister’s father-in law earns £1,000 a day from just one of these mechanical monsters.
Compare this with what Christopher Booker describes as “the huge windfall” being offered to villagers in Powys by the German-owned energy giant RWE, to win their support for a plan to build 65 3MW turbines, each 450ft high, at Llanbrynmair, on the hills of central Wales. This “sweetener”, as the BBC calls it, will amount to a staggering £18.8 million over 20 years. But from RWE’s own figures we can see that the wind farm’s possible income of £50 million a year will amount to £1 billion (£500 million of it subsidy) over the same 20-year period.
Is there anything positive at all that can be said of wind farms? Anything?
* My undying gratitude to Ms Smudd who was utterly munificent above and beyond the call of good manners at being awakened this morning by telephone, long before the streets had been aired, even in France, to be asked ‘what is that ditty that goes ” How much da dum da dum would a da dum da dum if a da dum da dum could”? She opened her good eye, and spake thus into the telephonic receiver proffered by her dear husband. “Wood chuck, Chuck, now chuck off, its my day off chuck if you would……” Far, far more polite than I would have been in similar circumstances.
** Must write out 100 times, France is one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time. France is one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time. France is one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time…
SBML is the landlord of the Raccoon Arms. He lives North of Watford and has an eclictic range of interests from Science and Technology to Politics including Woodwork and Genealogy. His political viewpoint has evolved from being a student demonstrator to more liberal views and has now seen the light in Libertarianism.
{ 72 comments }
one hour ? meh ! Where I am we are 9.5 hours ahead….that gets seriously confusing….. but to the point in hand.
I detect a few little glimmers that the “powers that be” are starting to realize that perhaps they are backing the wrong horse. That said – I think we should do all we can to avoid pollution prevent waste, look after the wildlife – all that stuff. But turbines are not going to power the family vehicle, far less the flight to Malaga….
Correct, wind generation is but one of many generation schemes being trialled and added to Scotlands grid. There are enough hydro sites in Scotland to power the entire UK, however they are under the control of rich landlords who will not release the ground and then the Royal Society for People with Beards would tie them up in expensive enquires.
It took nearly 20 years to get the scheme in Pitlochry approved. Mainly due to intransigence from Nabarro the coalman in the commons. Coal was the vested interest then as nuclear is now. Can you imagine the howling now if you announced you were going to demolish the dam and drain the loch? The fish ladder, the loch and the dam brings in millions in revenues to the town every year. Hydro was killed by the malicious Thatcher to reward her rich pals in the City. The NOSHEB was one of the first to be sold using cooked figures to sex it up, despite them pulling investment earlier, using another set of cooked figures to show Hydro was a loss making industry.
How much money will a Nuclear power plant earn? Answer, zero, zilch, nada. look at the only one being built in the world at the moment in Finland. Three years late and billions over spent. Look at the billions Dounreay is costing to decommission? What nuclear plant in the world was ever built using private finance? Answer= NONE.
HAVE YOU HEARD OF THE THE Schmallenberg virus? it’s in the UK now. Lambs being born dead or deformed, a virus? What else causes deformed births and stillborn births, our old friend nuclear. Can the billions of tons of nuclear waste thrown in to the sky and poured in to the sea have caused this? Fukushima, Chernobyl. We will not be told but we should be.
Nuclear power and WMDs are inextricably linked, Scotland wants neither.
Privately financed nuclear power station – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dresden_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Schmallenberg virus has nothing whatsoever to do with nuclear. You are conflating the fear of nuclear fallout with anything you feel like mentioning.
There was very little fallout from Fukishama and it was shortlived nuclear isotopes anyway. Those in the immediate area took iodine tablets which will have stopped any future problems. This was the reason why Chernobyl caused a lot of cancers, the Russian authorities wasted time denying the accident rather than give out iodine tablets.
Nuclear power is the answer to mankind’s energy requirements – unless we want to go back the 1800s in terms of living standards.
I think that ‘England Expects’ that more nuclear power stations should be built North of the border, where it is less populated by humans and that those that do dwell there are (if generalisations are to be believed) drink sodden, deeply racist neanderthals, to whom the ability to glow in the dark would be a positive advantage, when spending the wee small hours consuming vast quantities of vodka and super strength lager and indulging in mindless violence.
Those in Scotland forget that they are part of the Union. I do not believe for a moment that (despite the fervent wishes of those taxpayers in England, heartily fed up with subsidising the life apparently enjoyed by many of the denizens of that northern outpost) Alex Salmond will get his expressed way and we will be shot of them…
Unfortunately, I think that we will end up with the worst deal… scedeing more powers but, at the same time, still having to pay up to keep them. That being the case they can hardly complain about a few ‘rads’ here or there. Quid pro quo.
Nuclear power is inevitable. There is no way that a billion wind turbines can possibly hope to provide the power that we will need in the future. It is an additional source, but cannot be relied upon, is expensive, and not as efficient as has been promulgated.
Nuclear power stations would provide jobs and work. They would provide reliable clean energy. One cannot compare a power station in the UK with one in Japan or Russia. Which fool built power stations in a known earthquake/tsunami area and which other fool built one out of bits of old tractor and T-34 tank? Bound to go wrong.
Lastly, I think that the ‘Don Quixote’ of windmills has other things on his mind these days, so the drive to stick them on every spare square inch may have taken a stumble. Fingers crossed.
Well, HenBroon, if that’s what you want to believe, I don’t suppose us telling you it’s a load of tosh will make a scrap of difference. It is, however, a load of tosh.
There are very few sites in Scotland with sufficient head and flowrate to make hydro generation economically viable. The small-scale ones suffer from the burden of high maintenance costs (usually the problem of clearing blockages from intakes) to make them much other than local providers at high cost, to avoid the line-losses associated with long-distance transmission from the big generators.
The garbage you spout about ‘nuclear fallout’ is just plain wrong.
Just for the record, Dounreay is not, and never has been, a power station. It has always been a research and training establishment, and one that has brought great economic benefit to an otherwise economically starved area for over half a century.
“There are enough hydro sites in Scotland to power the entire UK”
There are not.
It’s a matter of physics: weight of water, height of drop, that sort of thing.
We simply don’t have enough big mountains. Switzerland and Norway can do it, more or less; go and look at their landscapes, and notice how much smaller their populations are.
On Schmallenburg, I don’t intend to feed the troll.
Oil and coal do not pollute. It has already been proven by real scientists that there has been no global warming caused by man’s activities. It’s all BS. So let’s cut out all this eco crap propaganda once and for all time
If I could afford it I would go out and buy the biggest V8 4×4 today and whack it down the nearest motorway at 100 mph +.
Have a nice say peeps, but please spare me all the UN bull shit posing as science. Thank you
Not sure about tear-jerking, but if vomit-inducing is your thing…
Many years ago, in primary school assembly, we were obliged to sing a noxious ditty thanking the Almighty for
‘Gay cars and bright buses
That go up and down.
Shop windows and playgrounds
And swings in the park,
And street lamps that twinkle
In rows after dark.’
I have no doubt that somewhere out there, high on a combination of environmentalism and happy-clappy religiosity, someone is working on a paean of devotional gratitude for the whirring abominations to be inflicted on the young and impressionable.
PS: lying drunkenly face down like Cardiff sluts = sheer genius!
Almost all our Dear Leaders talk utter rubbish on this topic. Windfarms are hopelessly unrealiable and expensive. The only practical solution is to get on with new power stations now, and stop faffing about. Nuclear too, because “carbon capture” technology does not really exist at the moment.
Unless that happens we are heading for a nightmare “lights out” “scenario” (ugh, hate that word) by about 2018.
Dear Leaders are really just Dear Followers of popularity. No-one wants a Power Station in their backyard let alone a Nuclear one. Pushing ahead with either option is a guaranteed vote loser and so all political parties will wait and wait till push goes past shove and becomes hanging onto the cliff-top by our fingernails. Then they’ll finally make a decision, not because they’ve found a backbone, but because the voting public have discovered an option they like even less than Power Stations. Then there will be several years of reviews and consultations as a sop to those whose backyard will be ruined and then far too late, and for far more money, we will have a power station.
Bugger – I’ve just managed to depress myself.
And there is little chance of a sensible discussion about Nuclear Power – those against will just shriek and point at 3 miles island, windscale, chernobyl and fukushima.
M Barnes,
You may think it explains a lot – but my father was an expert on nuclear power stations, all over the world; consequently what time I did spend in the family home, was always within a mile or so of a nuclear power station – Dounreay, Dungerness,Sellafield, Sizewell B.
Never did me any harm having one in my back yard, still don’t glow in the dark!
Unfortunately public discussion is frequently un-scientific, it is emotional and fortissimo and it is really easy to point to huge disasters and say ‘loooook, Nuclear Baaaad’. A few brave and rational souls have popped their heads above the parapet recently and I had hopes of sensible debate but that was before Fukushima.
People want all their energy needs met all wrapped up in a neat little bow with no down-side and that isn’t how life works. Everything has a consequence and we need to weigh up the pros and cons and then make a decision. Mobs aren’t very good at that tho’.
That’s it , this calls for drastic action – chocolate and damn the suger withdrawal low!
Liked the ditty BTW and the Cardiff Sluts line was excellent.
Hey now, I spent my formative years drunkenly lying atop of many an (equally drunk) Cardiff slut; all a teenage boy could ask for.
ROTFL
Did you not post in another entry that you had some bad disease?
Anna Raccoon March 5, 2012 at 13:56
M Barnes,
You may think it explains a lot – but my father was an expert on nuclear power stations, all over the world; consequently what time I did spend in the family home, was always within a mile or so of a nuclear power station – Dounreay, Dungerness,Sellafield, Sizewell B.
Never did me any harm having one in my back yard, still don’t glow in the dark!
_____________________________________________
Did you not post in another entry that you had some bad disease?
Indeed, I have Cancer – and you want to blame it on living next door to a nuclear power station 58 years ago?
I’ve also smoked for 50 years,
Eaten all the wrong foods,
Did once drink myself silly,
Had one Hell of a life,
and enjoyed every minute of it.
Some-thing’s got to carry me off, unless you want me to go on for ever
I think living in the lea of a nuclear power station has been the least of my worries.
Nice try!
So you think that Anna’s cancer is due to nuclear power? That’s just stupid. Sorry for being blunt. If that was the case then everyone living within a few miles of a power station would be dropping like flies.
Cancer is caused by many factors, most of them many times more likely than nuclear radiation poisoning.
Interesting.
The medical studies carried out on the workforce at Sellafield since it’s beginnings in the late 1940′s show that people working on the site actually enjoy better health than the general population. Life expectancy of contact workers (those who work in the most ‘active’ ares of the site) is longer than national average.
That may be partly because the medical requirements of fitness for those working in active areas are quite high, but there is absolutely no evidence, despite endless studies by just about every medical organisation under the sun, that a full career at Sellafield reduces your life expectancy.
As one of my former colleagues on the site said one day, “It’s a f****** sight safer than the coal mine I served my time down.”
Radiation Hormesis is worth the wikipedia entry if somewhat heavy going
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
A long time ago some anti-nuclear cleverdick found there were a number of “cancer clusters” near nuclear power stations and got a lot of tabloid headlines for it. Then a professional statistician pointed out that there were a number of nuclear power stations and that the frequency of nuclear clusters near nuclear power stations was actually LESS than if these clusters had been uniformly distributed across the UK.
Anti-nuclear campaigners continue to trot out this claim years after it has been comprehensively debunked.
… “a nightmare “lights out” “scenario” (ugh, …”
……………………………………………………………………
It could be worse, Gildas – spare a thought for the long-suffering Mr G who, at 06.45hrs this morning, had the phone shoved at him by Mme Raccoon who skipped off trilling “You speak to Glo now, Mr G! She’s still in bed, half naked and barely awake!” There followed a long silence until I heard him actually shudder with horror. What you might call a ‘nightmare “lights on” scenario’.
Remember those tomorrow’s world pundits who said we’d all have video-phones by the year 2000?
I installed a web cam for her last time I stayed there. She is a natural, seems totally unaware of her audience…
I’ve been paying the broadband bill from the income from the Youtube clips ever since.
Look, I had to get in the shower – I have an eighth of an inch of hair now which requires daily dedicated tending…..Mr G has long since forgotten that problem…bald old coot.
I have longed for reports from the Smudd bedroom for ages, but sadly this is not what wanted to hear….
Saint Christopher Booker is a legend……….so is Delingpole…….so is North.
We will win this thing.
History will record wind energy as one of the biggest scams of our time – a scandal on a par with bankers bonuses and MP’s expenses.
Sorry about the promotion but we must do something about it now before it is too late. Please object directly to the Government about wind turbines at http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/22958
or by GOOGLING “E-PETITION 22958″ and following the link.
This wind power bollocks is infinitely more egregious than bankers’ bonuses or MPs’ expense fiddles.
One must also remember that the turbines draw power from the grid to turn the blades when there isn’t enough wind to keep the gearboxes in working condition – the cost is not included in the running costs of the turbines.
For those that want to see how little electricity the windmills produce in relation to real power generators go to http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
“I have it on good authority from a marine engineer”
Funnily enough I wrote two blog posts on offshore wind failures, detailing failures of gearboxes, grouting, scour, and other failures, and the costs involved.
I’m an ex Marine Engineer as it happens.
I hope all your engineering remained well clear of the sea bed…
The wind turbines could be potentially useful.
By back-powering them from the grid (as Ivan pointed out above), they could be used as air-conditioning fans to keep the sheep cool on hot summer days, or to blow the hot air from Westminster out to sea.
Perhaps it’ll all go down in history as The North Sea Bubble.
Ooh, I quite like that. Not bad, eh?
Inspired!
Brilliant!
Though the plutocrats watch their funds double
The rest of us know wind power’s trouble.
For it’s really quite plain
That desire for gain
Has created the great North Sea Bubble.
Macheath that is a wonderful talent you have…… tip of the hat.
Thank you – but real credit goes to dearieme for the phrase; I just put the words in some kind of order.
Agreed! A doff of the bobble-hat from Glo!
That’s great. Double hat tip and bow from an aspirin poet – just trying to rhyme gives me a headache.
I penned one limerick on the general subject and was inspired to another…
Geoff Huhne is a Liberal dope
Green Power, Big Windmills… No hope!
If his wife’s legal tricks
He’s unable to fix
He’ll be buying some soap on a rope!
TWO limericks… in one evening! The rarified ideas on this blog must be affecting me!
“France is one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time…”
Sorry – GMT is not sufficiently “European” these days. Our “partners” couldn’t bear the though of Blighty still ruling the waves. It’s now UTC (Universal Coordinated Time). Just one more nail in our country’s coffin lid…
“So not only the land, but also the seas that surround us will be a wasteland of barely remembered vote-bribers lying drunkenly face down like Cardiff sluts?”
Brilliant, just brilliant
It had to be Cardiff, Blue Eyes – the Glasgow ones pass out face up for easy access…
According to Billy Connolly, a face down Glasgow woman is a convenient place to park one’s bike.
I suspect it is more to do with the aligned interests of a few. Ecoloons love it for the ethics, engineers love it for the dollar, the finance industry love it because they can charge 20%APR with guaranteed revenues, the land owners love it for the dollar, the seabed owners (i.e. the royals) love it for the dollar.
Everyone else, not so much. Still I recognise that a decent proportion should be wind, as it happens my Welsh homeland appears to be one of the windiest 3rd world countries in Europe.
Hang about – the engineers I know and worked with spotted this one as a load of b*ll*cks before most other people. The only ones that like it are ones taking the wind energy companies’ dollars.
Politics though isn’t it, the onshore landowners kick up a fuss and run 10 year legal blocking campaigns to keep their house values 5-10K higher.
Seabed belongs to the crown estate doesn’t it, they’re not going to complain for a few tens of millions per year.
Not quite the Duke of Edinburgh’s opinion, IIRC….
Spot on:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/prince-philip/8901985/Wind-farms-are-useless-says-Prince-Philip.html
Wind turbines are very useful and desirable. Without them many people would not be able to rip off the country by making and selling useless artifacts to gullible politicians and senior civil servants. Not all of them of course are gullible, some are just stupid and the astute ones corrupt. The really corrupt ones, however, are the members of the meeja who insist on promoting the so-called benefits of wind farms. Glad I got that off my chest.
It will be interesting to see if the demise of that nice Mr Huhne , number one proponent of the whole futile exercise, will be the opportunity for a discrete governmental re-appraisal.
“……… spent on this EU political correctness of ‘wind power’.”
I’m afraid Anna, this time you have the wrong target.
The reason the UK is being near-bankrupted, is because our ignorant, misinformed, lilly-livered politicians signed up to the Kyoto Protocol, without due diligence.
Maybe us Brits should learn from Icelandic voters:-
“The trial of Iceland’s former Prime Minister Geir Haarde, who is accused of negligence in his handling of the 2008 financial crisis that severely undermined the Icelandic economy, has begun in the capital, Reykjavik.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17256626
Basically anyone who challenges a British government or bank gets shagged really?
In the nearest thing he has to an electoral strategy, David Cameron is employing “give them enough rope” tactics.
Several policies are being spun in to self-suspending neckties; tuition fees for Vince Cable, windmills for Chris Huhne etc. Cameron will wait until they go very, very bad and then shrug “You can’t blame me, I supported you, but this is clearly your fault for pursuing a bad idea”.
He thus puts the LDs beneath his electoral yoke to make them drag his square-wheeled cart a little further before the axle snaps at the next election.
Yes, but Cameron won’t be able to completely disassociate himself from these stupid policies. Won’t the blow back also swing some crap (or stinging salt water) into his face?
We can but hope.
Huhne was a Liberal thug
Who caught the ‘Green Wind Power’ bug
The Plod caught him speeding
His Wife did some cheating
Now he’ll ‘Play the Pink Oboe’ in Jug…
If he is Bubba’s shower date, the oboe maybe a shade darker perhaps?
It has been estimated that the currently-planned windmills in the North Sea will require 45 million tons of concrete for their bases alone.
Just think about the logistics of supplying 45 million tons of concrete – how f***ing green is that ?
It’s funny how it’s “green” to use all that concrete in the sea yet the East Coast and many homes are being sacrificed to a policy of “managed retreat” because coastal defences aren’t cost effective. Yet paying premiums to big business for windypower elect and rents to landowners is?
You could build enough Thorium fueled reactors with an operating life of 100 years to power the National Grid for significantly less than the subsidies that are going to be paid out on these wind farms, but politicians are merely puppets to the powers that be who remain hidden in the shadows and follow the line they have prostituted their integrity and humanity for.
The Thorium fuel cycle was under active research in the early 1950′s, but was dropped in favour of the Uranium cycle because the latter could be used to produce a material we desperately needed at the time to counter the Soviet threat – and the thorium one didn’t.
The knowledge gained then has not gone away. For the future – who knows?
They are actually building test thorium reactors in China and India. We get left behind again because of the green lobby that seems to want the nation to live as if we were in the 15th century.
The issue has been bubbling round academic circles for a while now; the BBC covers it from time to time.
See Thorea at Huddersfield for a quick round-up.
http://thorea.hud.ac.uk/
The last time average planetary temperatures increased by 5°C, it took 20,000 years, and as a result, the North polar ice cap retreated from the latitudes of Southern Germany, and the average sea level rose by 120 metres.
Global temeratures are expected to rise by about 5°C between now and 2100. (This second 5°C rise taking herefore a mere 200 years) Given the enormity of the ecological disaster that this would represent (extinction of the human species, anyone?) I think that a serious considerations of all the possible options available to us is warranted, even if in the short term they appear futile.
By the way, you seem to have some very witty and tolerant friends. I’m sure that if I had been woken in the way you describe, my response would have been more down-to-earth
So you’re a believer of Catastrophic AGW then. Did you know the global temperatures already rise by 4-5C already. Every year in fact.
But seriously, to get the 5C increase by 2100 would require everyone to not only stop all forms of cutting back on CO2 but to increase it for the rest of the century. As an example about how hard this is, if all the US’ coal fired powered station carried on till the end of the century then they would add 0.6 of a degree at most to global temperatures. There are other countries like China, but as they advance technologically they will switch away from coal and implemenet measures to cut back CO2. Having said all that, the 5C rise is the worst case scenario from the IPCC, not the most likely.
As for extinction of the human species. No. Well we see to have lived through a lot of different climates. Humanity will carry on. It will be different to now in many ways, but there will still be humans living on this planet for many centuries to come. Climate change will not turn the Earth into Venus.
Too bad neither of us (or anyone reading this) will be alive in 2100 to see if that is true. I will ask my son to post on the quantum 3-D interactive internet or whatever it maybe by then, because Harry might just make 91 years, where as I may struggle to see 135!
Why is no-one going on about the number of wind turbines that don’t turn due to mechanical failure? I have observed in passing several windfarms where half the windmills were turning and the other half were stationary.
Given that I do not go looking for windfarms – given the choice I should avoid them – this isn’t “a few out of a very large number”, it is a few out of a fairly small number.
I’m not exactly sure of the area, but some parts of the Rockies in Montana, USA have high background levels of radition and no negative health effects have been found. Also there is Ramsar in Northern Iran where the background level of radition is 200 hihger than normal and people still live there having healthy lives.
Oh and HenBroon don’t eat too many Bananas.
And whatever you do don’t eat bananas while living in North Cornwall…..