I fully support proposals to have dozens more winds farms offshore around the UK, but i wonder what objectors will say.
In Norfolk recently objectors have used the excuse that the RAF claim wind farms create problems for their radar stations. Personally I feel this is all a load of old tosh as if they RAF are having problems picking up something just two miles away fro the shoreline, I would want to know why they didn't detect them hundreds of miles away where there are no wind farms at all.
With more and more fears about the stability of Russia and our dependence on Russian gas, anything that provides us with alternatives to fossil fuels has got to be good. Still, I guess it wont stop protesters complaining about it spoiling their views.
I remember when I was a councillor in North Norfolk being phoned up by a resident of a nearby village who asked my opinion on wind turbines. He asked if I would be happy to have one near where I lived. I said I would have no problem and preferred a wind turbine to a power station. He could not see the relationship between the two as he opposed wind farms full stop. We know we are terrible NIMBY's in this country, so surely having wind farms offshore is a sensible solution to the problem ?
5 comments:
I don't mind offshore, but I'm not so keen on inland.
But for me this raises the question of spending: How much does the government spend on nuclear submarines compared with how much it invests in scientific research for new forms of energy?
We have two turbines about 10 miles from us and i rather like them and think they are attractive things. I always remember reading about the painter Van Dijk who refused to paint the drainage windmills on his painting of landscapes in Holland because he thought them ugly but 20 years later agreed they were beautiful and offered to paint them in for people.
I wonder how cost effective wind energy is these days. It isn't long ago (perhaps less than a decade or so), when the amount of energy needed to produce the aluminium used in wind turbine exceeded the amount of energy that the turbine was expected to produce. The difference had to be produced with some other form of energy, for instance in a nuclear plant.
Nich,
The wind blows as and when, the tide is totally predictable. Why not use underwater turbines such as http://www.reuk.co.uk/Tidal-Turbines.htm
I think wind turbines are more about show than practicality.
I agree Andy, we need a bit of everything, to be honest, and that includes nuclear. The good thing about nuclear is thay yoou can turn up the power when the wind is light and can lower it when the wind is strong.
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