While mostly being in the greenish camp (less than 3,000 miles per year in the car, grow our own veg, make do and mend whenever possible), I am thrown up against my own principles by a totally inappropriate wind farm threatening our village. The one already operating 2 km away is no problem, but this proposed one will have turbines the height of Blackpool Tower within 500 metres of housing, school, church, and will have one turbine within topple distance (and ice drop distance) of two roads and within 100 metres of a designated nature reserve. With all that in mind I've done a fair amount of research on alternative energy sources and wind turbine power is not the way to go. It's expensive and the energy production figures are calculated on potential power, not actual. The two are very different. During the cold snap in 2010 wind turbines produced just 9% of their potential. NINE PERCENT! (Note that's 9% of their potential not 9% of our power reqirements, so a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction!)
Unfortunately our government is intent on fulfilling its promise to the EU for 20% of our energy to be from green sources by 2020, and a low cost way of doing that is to get private industry to foot the bill. Hence they are encouraging speculators to select (mostly) inappropiate development opportunities knowing that they'll make their money on the subsidies even if the wind farms don't produce the power they estimated. (And they won't. They never do.)
We're pissing in the wind with turbines. If we're going to make the radical changes we need, the only practical source of low carbon power production is nucelar. How green is that? It certainly would not have been my first choice a few years ago. Now I can't see the alternative.
Unfortunately a knee-jerk reaction to Fukushima has turned the tide of opinion away from that direction.
Something watervole mentioned briefly makes the most sense to me. We're already stuffed. The climate is changing, as it has always changed throughout history, whatever the cause. The relative stability that we've had for the last few hundred years is a blip. Unfortunately that blip coincided with our industrial and technological revolutions and we allowed ourselves to rely on it. What we should be doing is looking for solutions to enable us to cope with the inevitability of climate change, not trying to slam the stable door while the nag is already prancing round the paddock.
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Unfortunately our government is intent on fulfilling its promise to the EU for 20% of our energy to be from green sources by 2020, and a low cost way of doing that is to get private industry to foot the bill. Hence they are encouraging speculators to select (mostly) inappropiate development opportunities knowing that they'll make their money on the subsidies even if the wind farms don't produce the power they estimated. (And they won't. They never do.)
We're pissing in the wind with turbines. If we're going to make the radical changes we need, the only practical source of low carbon power production is nucelar. How green is that? It certainly would not have been my first choice a few years ago. Now I can't see the alternative.
Unfortunately a knee-jerk reaction to Fukushima has turned the tide of opinion away from that direction.
Something watervole mentioned briefly makes the most sense to me. We're already stuffed. The climate is changing, as it has always changed throughout history, whatever the cause. The relative stability that we've had for the last few hundred years is a blip. Unfortunately that blip coincided with our industrial and technological revolutions and we allowed ourselves to rely on it. What we should be doing is looking for solutions to enable us to cope with the inevitability of climate change, not trying to slam the stable door while the nag is already prancing round the paddock.