Well this is a can of worms
problem is that there are too many people with ever increasing energy consumption.
We need to reduce energy consumption not build more power stations.
My feeling of wind farms is that they are a necessary part of the solution to meeting our energy needs. The question of whether they are pretty is irrelevant - although it is the primary motivation of the NIMBYs.
In the last two years the Greenland and Antarctic icesheets have been melting faster even than many of the environmentalists' predictions on global warming had estimated. If we don't reduce our CO2 emissions, large parts of the country will soon be underwater - then the NIMBY's will be the ones demanding why nothing was done sooner.
We now seem to be going flat out to cover the country with wind farms. A recent review of their performance has shown that they only produce 25% of their theoretical maximum and at the time of peak demand (early evening) it is typically less than 10%. This may be because in winter the wind drops after sunset. The same is true if we get high pressure over this country. So it is an unreliable source of electricity.
true- wind will never provide all our power all the time, but it is quite rare that there is no wind anywhere in the country - so when one windfarm is becalmed another one elsewhere in the country will be producing power. It doesn't matter if a windmill isn't producing 100% of it's rated output - they were never expected to - what matters is that they are reducing the amount of power produced by fossil fuels.
now the cost of all this wind power nuclear power is sold for approx 5 pence per unit or cheaper it may not be the safest or the most pretty of constructions but compared to wind power that is sold for 25 pence per unit and is not available 24/7 is a lot cheaper
But that's because nuclear is very substantially subsidised - Alas I don't have figures to quantify how much. While windmills do have a significant carbon footprint (the large concrete base in particular) it is small compared to the cost of construction and decommissioning of nuclear power stations (do you have any idea how many 1000 tons of concrete go into the construction of a nuclear plant?) - let alone the cost of containing nuclear waste - and if you factor in the possible costs incurred in the event of a nuclear accident it gets even worse. Also, even though the mill itself had a lifetime of 25yrs, the concrete base (if properly constructed) can probably be re-used for the mills' replacement.
While I totally agree there is an urgent need for clean energy 'wind' is not the answer
Then what is?
Alas there's no easy answer to that question. And probably no single 'right' answer.
IMHO:
There are too many people - well there's no morally acceptable quick solution to that problem.
The first part of the answer is reducing our consumption (substantially) - insulation, and turning things off. I think we are going to have to get used to living with a lot less. Not just electricity, but transport fuel too.
Fuel for shipping goods (though perhaps not food & medicine) should be taxed - we shouldn't be shipping ore halfway across the world to be turned into metal, then shipping ingots again to where they are turned into machine parts only to ship them back to where they are going to be used. We should be encouraging local production and manufacturing - that's not patriotism - it's simple common sense.
On a more local level we've got a crazy system in parts of this country where high earners who work in the towns live out in the countryside buying up all the rural property, which forces the people who work in agriculture (i.e. in the countryside) to live in the cheaper town properties. It's utter madness to have these people commuting past each other every day.
the trouble is, while it's easy to see these problems, straightening them out is problematic.
m
