Wind Turbines
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I do a lot of sailing around the East Coast. 15 years ago you came out of the river Crouch, wiggled round the sand banks and crossed the Thames on the way to Dover and only ever saw the odd fishing boat or container ship.
Today you pass four windmill fields, each with 200 to 300 turbines, half of them not going round. It's like driving around a bloody high rise estate. And more support ships buzzing about than you can jump over. I bet they burn more diesel than the power they generate.
Green energy, ********.
Today you pass four windmill fields, each with 200 to 300 turbines, half of them not going round. It's like driving around a bloody high rise estate. And more support ships buzzing about than you can jump over. I bet they burn more diesel than the power they generate.
Green energy, ********.
Monkey Spanker
Well-Known Member
We are getting a lot of the component parts on trucks passing through. By Christ they are massive! The tubular sections block the whole road. The blades take two trucks some distance apart!
It seems the offshore farms are good for fish stocks to regenerate as the boats can't net.
Safe bet.
Like ethanol in the USA. Takes 2.5 gallons of diesel fuel to produce the corn for 1 gallon of ethanol.
Then you blend it 10% with gasoline, and get less miles per gallon because it has less than half the latent energy of gasoline.
Government solution = subsidize ethanol, because it is "green" and "renewable".
They don't even know that oil is a "fossil" fuel. Fracturing recovering has made oil renewable.
In my opinion they don't look half as ugly or take up as much good farm land as the acres and acres of solar farms we have sprouting up in the south west.At least another two have gone up around M5 and the A38 near slimbridge in the last couple of months and they are huge.All the land taken up and deer fenced.
countrryboy
Well-Known Member
From the hill above my town on a clear day could probably see 400 odd turbines and speaking to someone who does all the environmental impact studies a lot more on the way.
I no longer mind the look of them, its just the waste of money and how ineffecient they really are. Most of the 1's near me required cutting down vast areas of commercial timber prematurely which would off cost a fair bit as well as the carbon footprint
Tidal or hydro is the way to go, a few of the local big landowners have put various hydro schemes in and u would not even know they are there, producing power 24/7 only down side if there is a drought. But how ofen does that happen in scotland?
And even if it did still a time when electrirty is required less (summer) and any peaks in production will be during the winter colder months. U get a real cold snap/frost those turbine will never turn, when we had those 2 cold winters 4/5 years ago the turbines hardly turned for 4-6 weeks.
I do think the mini turbines for private energy are quite a good thing thou as u have the grid for back up, but madnes to think turbines can reliablly supply the grid
Not sure if the technology is really there yet with tida but again 24/7 energy and 2 of uks esturies are right up there for the quickeist tidal flow in europe!
I no longer mind the look of them, its just the waste of money and how ineffecient they really are. Most of the 1's near me required cutting down vast areas of commercial timber prematurely which would off cost a fair bit as well as the carbon footprint
Tidal or hydro is the way to go, a few of the local big landowners have put various hydro schemes in and u would not even know they are there, producing power 24/7 only down side if there is a drought. But how ofen does that happen in scotland?
And even if it did still a time when electrirty is required less (summer) and any peaks in production will be during the winter colder months. U get a real cold snap/frost those turbine will never turn, when we had those 2 cold winters 4/5 years ago the turbines hardly turned for 4-6 weeks.
I do think the mini turbines for private energy are quite a good thing thou as u have the grid for back up, but madnes to think turbines can reliablly supply the grid
Not sure if the technology is really there yet with tida but again 24/7 energy and 2 of uks esturies are right up there for the quickeist tidal flow in europe!
Agree with the hydro schemes that some landowners are putting in as you say you can hardly see them a bit of a scar on the landscape for a year or two but soon blends in, much more efficient than wind turbines also
Estate I was on put one in a small but fast flowing burn, producing almost as much electricity as a nearby Hydro
scheme built in the 1950s and that entailed a massive dam and a five mile long loch behind it.
Estate I was on put one in a small but fast flowing burn, producing almost as much electricity as a nearby Hydro
scheme built in the 1950s and that entailed a massive dam and a five mile long loch behind it.
Agreed with the Hydro schemes, I too have seen a few on estates which are very unobtrusive after a few years of habitat regrowing around them and highly efficient.
As someone who spends a lot of time on boats around the coast I'm not yet convinced abut the tidal schemes. In theory they could be very good but the environmental issues around river silting and erosion. The tide does not flow very quickly either, most estuaries peak for 3 hours at 2 to 3 knots with the remaining 3 hours of a tidal stream flowing at 0 to 2 knots. The big worm type drives are not yet efficient and converting this slow flow into efficient power to my knowledge.
paul k
Well-Known Member
There's some that think that the installs of a number of wind farms off the North Wales coast might have something to do with the apparent up turn in sea trout and bass numbers.
paul k
Well-Known Member
The worry with both in river hydro schemes and tidal lagoons is that they are going to result in the deaths of some migratory fish passing through the turbine screws and inhibition of their access to rivers.
Blackpowder
Well-Known Member
Lammermuirs are well served with wind farms> At the most recent one on outlying Coldingham Moors 200hectares of immature softwoods have been felled to assist the wind farm as planning authority would not allow the height requested. A section of public road has been churned to a track due to timber extraction and construction traffic, the latter mainly involved in making access roads. They are costing us dear.
Blackpowder
Blackpowder
csl
Administrator
+1
Apart from the fact that it's a waste of land and they are ugly... they are also grossly inefficient, especially in the UK, and apparently produce less energy than if the land been used to produce biofuel.
That's false.
The blades are balanced but they are robust enough to withstand birdstrikes and lightning. I've even seen blades with holes in them through to the lower layers of fibre and resin.
I'm not sure where youre looking or how youre counting but the four fields you see as you come out of the River Crouch are:
Gunfleet Sands 48 turbines
Greater Gabbard 140 Turbines
Kentish Flats 30 Turbines with 15 turbine extension under construction
London Array 175 turbines. The worlds largest operating offshore windfarm. There may be plans for the 200 or 300 turbine fields but none exist as yet!
No of them burn diesel either!
bewsher500
Well-Known Member
no but the energy and toxic waste in producing them makes coal fired generators look positively clean!
This is true to an extent.
In some offshore windfarms fishing exclusion zones have been created for the life of the windafrm (which is usually 20 years) mostly though fishing is allowed once the construction phase is over.
The windfarm sites become great nuseries for the fish stocks and there is/was some pressure from environmenatlists to make the windfarms Marine Conservation Zones.
My experience is that the fishermen mostly stay away anyway.
That is true for every power plant construction project. Over the lifespan of a nuclear powerplant (from constrauction to decommissioning) the estimate is 16gCO2e/kwh which is comaparable with that of an offshore windfarm.
Cheers buddy, I thought they looked too big to be that fragile.
But surely when they decommission an off shore windfarm there'll be huge great lumps of concrete littering the seabed, whereas a land based power station could be left as green fields.
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