Ming Campbell is calling for Britain to become entirely carbon neutral by 2050. I wonder what the weather is like for Ming in cloud cuckoo land. This is from a previous post:The government has blown (excuse the pun) half a billion pounds subsidising the wind turbine industry. "So what, it's a worthy cause" I hear you say. Well, it turns out that it is anything but worthy and more worryingly, it is a total waste of our tax money. It is alleged that energy companies are receiving subsidies for wind farms that will never make any money, because they have exaggerated the potential of sites with not enough wind.
The government are miles away (or kilometers as our EU friends prefer) from achieving the target of providing 20% of our energy from renewable sources by 2020. Despite blowing (there I go again - sorry) half a billion pounds of our money, the energy companies have failed to provide even 0.5% of our requirements. For a wind farm to be viable it must have a load factor of 30 per cent. But Jim Oswald, an engineering consultant, found that the average across the country was 28 per cent.
Michael Jefferson, policies chairman of the World Renewable Energy Network believes that the subsidies are encouraging energy companies to exaggerate the amount of potential wind energy a farm can supply. Mr Jefferson said: "We should be putting our money where the wind is and that is quite often not where the development pressure is."
In a previous post about nuclear power’s life-cycle emissions it turned out that the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions for nuclear plants are lower than that of wind farms. Now it turns out that on average these farms are not even financially viable.
At least one LibDem as some sense. Chris Davies, the Lib Dem climate change spokesman in the European Parliament said: "I have always been opposed to nuclear power. It is expensive, creates a legacy of radioactive waste and has absorbed public resources that should have been used to develop alternative technologies. But the imperative now is to fight global warming. We cannot ignore the fact that our existing nuclear power stations do not release carbon dioxide."
For God's sake (and ours) let's stop pandering to the green brigade and get some nuclear power plants built.
3 comments:
I agree with you. The sooner we get the nuclear power plants built the better.
Wind warms are just what they are---alternative sources of energy---until such time when technology for them improves.
Nuclear power is a guarantee of reliable and cheap electricity without the downsides of coal and other outdated power plants.
The following are a couple of interesting news on the subject from Voxant's Newsroom. It's where you can find licensed news you can use in web publishing. Please email jtowns@voxant.com for details on how we can be your partner in great news content.
Wind Energy White Paper Outlines Concerns About Wind Industry's Rapid and Unregulated Growth: http://www.thenewsroom.com/details/373169?c_id=wom-bc-ar
Wind farms put wildlife, scenery at risk: http://www.thenewsroom.com/details/269748?c_id=wom-bc-ar
- Alvin from TheScienceDesk at the Voxant Newsroom
Wind farms, not wind warms.
Here's another news item from Voxant's Newsroom regarding wind farms.
Power Lines Spark Complaints: http://www.thenewsroom.com/details/93758?c_id=wom-bc-ar
- Alvin from TheScienceDesk at the Voxant Newsroom
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