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Susan Boyle is undoubtedly an outsandingly talented singer. I’m not into the kind of music she sings, I’m more into rock and techno, but if she won BGT I wouldn’t think it unfair.
One thing resulting from the huge programme for offshore wind farms is that the need for building land-based windfarms here is much reduced.
These are the statistics I’ve got on land-based, or onshore windfarms in UK.
The figures are the number of individual wind turbines.Operational now………..3390
Under Construction………846
Given go-ahead…………1837
Planned……………………3244I make that a total of 9317 – but this includes a lot of fairly small turbines, down to 225 kilowatts, about one tenth of what a typical big turbine is rated at.
I’m guessing that this represents about the maximum extent of land-based windpower, give or take a few turbines.
By the time all these have been built, the much bigger offshore programme will be well advanced.One more statistic I gleaned – a bit out of date – wind turbines in UK on average produce about 31% of their rated capacity, but in winter, when there is more wind and more demand for electricty, that figure rises to 44%. They produce their full rated output for 10% of the time.
It’s all planned, so the chances are it will happen. It’s at least as likely as the proposed 10-12 new nuclear power stations being built. I’m sure maintenance won’t be cheap, but there’s no cost of mining and transporting the fuel, as with coal. If this is going to be a new industry, ongoing maintenence costs is part and parcel of it, as with most other industries. A lot of the offshore engineering skills from the North Sea oil and gas industry are transferable to offshore wind turbine maintenance, and as the the oil and gas declines, the windfarms could provide employment for displaced workers.
Fifty years ago, who would have believed that we’d be extracting oil and gas from under bed of the North Sea with huge drilling rigs and that Britain’s entire gas network would be converted from coal-gas to natural gas over a period of a few years during the 1970s? The whole idea would have been ridiculed by most people….e,g, “But, my good fellow, even if there is any oil or gas beneath the North Sea, how the blue blazes would you extract it and transport it to the land?”
The offshore turbines do not need islands, each one is individually installed on a pedestal fixed to the sea-bed. See pic of the existing offshore windfarm off the Norfolk coast. It seems there are 3 methods of installing the pedestal – a single large pile driven into the seabed, 3 smaller piles supporting a tripod or ‘gravity’, where the pedestal is embedded in a very large block of concrete that rests on the sea bed. The Dogger Bank, where many of the large offshore windfarms are proposed, has a sea depth varying between 15 and 36 metres – shallow in terms of underwater construction.
http://www.independent.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00062/windfarm_62569s.jpg
And here is a map of the grand masterplan:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00347/map_347887a.jpg
The big orange areas show where the Round 3 windfarms are planned to be, but they won’t fill the entire areas!Fusion was cracked ages ago. It’s known as the hydrogen bomb!!!
But seriously, it looks like there’s enough in the idea of controlled fusion to make serious continuing research worthwhile.
Not half a country’s worth arent planned, and they’re high maintenance. Realistically there’s two options long term, coal or nuclear unless someone cracks nuclear fusion
The plan is to produce 35-45% of our electricity from windpower by 2020.
Here’s a link to the Crown Estate’s info on Round 3 proposals, which would be for many far-offshore windfarms producing up to 25GW of electricity – to add to the 8GW that the Round 1 and Round 2 windfarms will produce when they are completed. That would come to 33GW. Britain’s total electricty generating capacity at the moment is about 75GW, although output is usually around 40GW, rising to a maximum of 60GW in winter.
Hurry now if you want to tender for a contract!!!
see:- http://www.thecrownestate.co.uk/round3The cost of linking all these new windfarms to the grid with undersea cables is estimated at £10 billion on top of the cost of purchasing and installing the wind turbines.
Building 12 new nuclear power stations, as is being considered, would cost up to £30 billion. The decommissioning costs of existing nuclear power stations is estimated at £73 billion – but we’re stuck with that.
You miss my point, I’m not saying that they don’t generate power, just that they don’t generate it when we need it. That’s why they are all but useless, they can’t even store the power they generate (capacitors being useless for this purpose) That’s why for all the alternative energy sources that are built, you need a standard back up supply for. far simpler to just use the reliable back up instead and scrap the alternatives as a costly and wasteful use of resources.
They generate power when the wind is blowing. Which, offshore around Britain, is most of the time. Wind turbines won’t meet all our electricity needs but they can signicantly reduce the amount of finite resources that are consumed. It’s true the elctricity cannot be stored, unless you go for more pump-storage hydro like is used already. But with the switch to electric cars and plug-in hybrids that is likley over the next few years, overnight battery charging will use some of the surplus.
If you want wind to supply all the country’s energy needs then you have to cover half the country with wind turbines… that isnt just a throw away phrase you would literally have to cover half the country
Except that most of the planned turbines are going to be many miles offshore!
Wind power is not inefficient since the ‘fuel’, i.e. wind, is free. The efficiency comes in designing the turbines capture as much of the wind energy as possible and converting it to electrical energy.
The wind energy policy recognises the fact that the wind is inconsistent. The expected total average output from the offshore windfarms, according to the statistics, is about half their total rated capacity, which isn’t bad. One has to remember that only a proportion of the heat generated by a nuclear reactor or coal-fired boiler actually goes into producing steam to drive the generators, a lot is just dissipated.
It’s true that we cannot rely on wind power alone. A lot of gas-fired power stations have been built in the last 20 years and these have the advantage that they can be started up and shut down rapidly, unlike big coal-fired or nuclear ones. The windfarms will mean that the gas-fired power stations will be dormant for much more of the time, saving on the consumption of North Sea gas, which is already running out.
Windpower has made the journey from eco-hippie gadgets, via political pressure groups, to big business. Vestas, Enercon, Seimens, Nordex, RE-Power and General Electric, to name just 6 manufacturers, build large wind turbines on a commercial scale.
I agree nuclear might have a place in future energy policy because nuclear power stations are best kept working at a constant output. But, given the decomissioning costs that will be incurred by all nuclear power stations, they are likely to cost as much as the wind option …..and uranium is a finite resource.
An interesting new development is the ‘Wave Treader’ device, that generates electricity from waves. Rated at 0.5MW, it’s designed to be attached, by a collar, to the base of offshore wind turbines. So, theoretically, each 2MW offshore wind turbine could become a 2.5MW combined wind/wave device.
The one worry I have about this huge expansion of offshore windpower is the long-term durability of the turbines. Generally they are pretty robust but occasionally one breaks. What would the casualty rate of turbine blades be in a storm like the 1987 hurricane?
It’s not climate change we should be worrying about, but rather what we do when the oil and gas runs out. But the solution to both problems is the same – a combination of renewable energy and energy savings.
It is planned that Britain will be producing between 35% and 45% of its electricity from wind power by 2020. The Round 2 offshore windfarms will soon be getting under way – one of the biggest, the Thames Array, 12 miles off the Thames Estuary, will produce up to 1000 megawatts, equivalent to a nuclear power station.
The Crown Estates are working out the Round 3 offshore windfarms – these will be further offshore and some will be vast. It even includes provision to install big wind farms on the Dogger Bank in the middle of the North Sea.
This huge project is going on almost un-noticed by the media, while elderly middle-class nimbys protesting about a proposed wind turbine a couple of miles from their homes makes the news.
Electric cars are now really on the agenda again as major manufacturers get involved.
Renault has even announced that it’s stopping research on hybrids and concentrating on pure battery electric cars. That is probably because they see a gap in the market since all the other biggies are working on hybrids.So it’s all coming together. Surplus energy generated by wind turbines at night, when demand is lower, can be utilised to charge the batteries of electric cars. Plug-in hybrid cars like the Chevrolet Volt overcome the limited range problem – they run as pure battery electric cars until the battery starts to run low, when the engine starts up to drive a generator to charge the battery.
I think we’re on the edge of proving the doubters wrong. We are on the edge of a huge leap forward in harnessing renewable energy. On wind turbines, the doubters would say: “But do you know how many wind turbines you’d need to produce the same amount of electricity as a nuclear power station?”, hoping they could destroy your argument by explaining that you’d need between 400 and 500. But they didn’t expect the response “Well, in that case, let’s build them, in the North Sea!
There are obvioulsly quite a lot of Welsh people in England who are able to speak Welsh, one figure I read for this was over 100,000 but that’s not really what I’m on about in the original post. I mean small pockets on along the English side of the Welsh border where Welsh is spoken day-to-day by a proportion of the inhabitants.
The plain fact is that if you speak very loudly and slowly and wave your arms around a bit … “foreigners” invariably understand you.
The French use a variation of this method when communicating with foreigners, in which they speak French faster and quieter instead of slower and louder.
so are you English hmmmmm no maybe a mixture of French, Dutch with a bit of Scandanavian thrown in….but not English in the true sense of the word……
There has been hundreds of years of mixing between the English, Welsh and Scots.
Also recent genetic evidence suggests the Britonic Celts weren’t all driven out of England, a lot were thought to have stayed and been assimilated into Anglo-Saxon culture. Also, Wales might have avoided the Anglo-Saxons but it did have Norse, Viking and Norman settlements.Most English people will have some Welsh ancestry and vice versa. I am half English, a quarter Welsh and a quarter Irish, for instance. I have never thought of myself a English, but always British.
By the way over the centuries when invaders from Europe came over spreading throughout the southeast, the Britons fled to the hills
The Britons were also invaders from Europe around 500 BC. They probably did the same to the previous inhabitants, the Beaker People, Gaels and Picts, as the Saxons did to them!!
