Okay - it's a long one - but worth the read... basically the Labour Govt have committed to building the Worlds largest Wind Farm off our coast in the hope of making 'free' electricity. Only it's going to costs 10's of Billions more than if they just built some clean Nuclear Power stations.

It's worth a read... you won't believe what these idiots get up to.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/16/nbook116.xml

Britain has never concocted a crazier plan

Last week, amid the clouds of self-righteous humbug billowing out from Bali, Gordon Brown committed us to what I do not hesitate to call the maddest single decision ever made by British ministers. It was announced by John Hutton, Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, that we are to build 7,000 giant offshore wind turbines round Britain's coast by 2020, to meet our EU target on renewable energy. It will be the largest concentration of such industrial monsters in the world, enough, claimed Mr Hutton, to power every home in the country.

No matter that Mr Hutton's officials warned him in August it was not conceivable that we could achieve even a much lower target. So keen was Mr Brown that Britain should "lead Europe on climate change" that Mr Hutton was told to ignore his officials - and the media reported his claims without questioning whether such a megalomaniac project was remotely feasible.

For a start, no one mentioned costs. Mr Hutton spoke of his turbines, equivalent to one every half mile of coastline, as having a capacity of 33 gigawatts (GW), a hefty chunk of the 75GW of power we need at peak demand. But with the cost of giant offshore turbines, as tall as 850 feet, estimated at £1.6 billion per GW of capacity, this represents a bill of more than £50 billion - equivalent to the colossal sum earmarked last week by central banks to shore up the world banking system.

But of course the point about offshore turbines is that, because wind blows intermittently, they only generate on average at a third or less of capacity. So Mr Hutton's 33GW figure comes down to 11GW. To generate this much power from "carbon-free" nuclear energy would require six or seven nuclear power stations and cost, at something under £20 billion, less than half as much as the turbines.

This, however, is only the start of the madness. Because those turbines would generate on average only a third of the time, back-up would be needed to provide power for the remaining two thirds - say, another 12 nuclear power stations costing an additional £30 billion, putting the real cost of Mr Hutton's fantasy at nearer £80 billion - more than doubling our electricity bills.

But we must then ask whether it would be technically possible to carry out the most ambitious engineering project ever proposed in Britain. As pointed out by energy expert Professor Ian Fells, this would require us to raise from the seabed two of these 2,000 ton structures every working day between 2008 and 2020. Denmark, with the world's largest offshore wind resource, has never managed to build more than two a week, and marine conditions allow such work for only a third of the year.

It is not only on this count that Brown and Hutton's dream is unrealisable. The turbines' siting would mean that much of the national grid would have to be restructured, costing further billions. And because wind power is so unpredictable and needs other sources available at a moment's notice, it is generally accepted that any contribution above 10 per cent made by wind to a grid dangerously destabilises it.

Two years ago, much of western Europe blacked out after a rush of German windpower into the continental grid forced other power stations to close down. The head of Austria's grid warned that the system was becoming so unbalanced by the "excessive" building of wind turbines that Europe would soon be "confronted with massive connector problems". Yet Mr Hutton's turbines would require a system capable of withstanding power swings of up to 33GW, when the only outside backup on which our island grid can depend is a 2GW connector to France (which derives 80 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power).

Nothing better illustrates the fatuity of windpower than the fact that Denmark, with the highest concentration of turbines in the world, must export more than 80 per cent of its wind-generated electricity to Norway, to prevent its grid being swamped when the wind is blowing, while remaining heavily reliant the rest of the time on power from Sweden and Germany.

The Danes, who decided in 2002 to build no more turbines, have learnt their lesson. We British have still to learn it. Every time we hear that over-used term "green" we should remember it has another meaning: someone who is naively foolish and dangerously gullible.

 

Agree it's bollocks. We should be getting free/subsidised waste disposal units and putting foodwaste into the sewerage system where it can be digested properly and turned into ££££££'s, home composting?

 

£80 BILLION

And how far would THAT go towards building one or more tidal barriers for TRUE free electricity, no supply problems, and transport and flooding problems partly solved too.

Fekkin Labour

Alcazar

 

I mean; on top of the fantastical figures being bounced around, they are simply not able to rely on wind power as it only produces a THIRD of the rated power ON AVERAGE.

What they aren't taking into account are the massive peaks and troughs that are going to have to be filled in / passed on to or from wherever!!!

It's a bloody Government living in La-La- Land... Oh yeah, there you go:

La-La- Labour.

Yeesh.

 

Get them voted out and these problems are over....


...and a new lot will start

 

Are any labour officials or indeed any of their advisors a member of the IEE??

 

The cost seems to be comparable to the money spend on Trident and the Olympics. I would rather it was spent on establishing a power source. I don't believe that surges in electricity are insurmountable problems and that engineers will sort this in time. One obvious route is to use excess power to pump water to a "lake" well above sea level and then when the surge is over to drain this water back to sea level through turbines to generate power at a controllable level. This is probably a bit inefficient and expensive at the moment otherwise I am sure the Danes would be on the case. Perhaps they are?

I think also that a lot more work can be done at looking at tidal power. I did a bit of very basic research on this recently and there seems a lot less going on in this field than you might suspect. The general view seems to be that the infrastructure costs are excessive but I think that many schemes are overengineered and there is huge potential in this area. dl

 

I think the Danes don't have anywhere well above sea level to site the lake...

 

Poor conservatives are going to catch the flak for 10 years of nu labia mismanagement.

 

You can get a turbine from B & Q for under 2 grand - perhaps that's what they were planning to use

 

Is it possible to "over-engineer" a wall that has the weight of an ocean behind it?

 

I think it might be. If you choose a rocky coastline and blast a big hole carefully then you use the rock as side walls and then just need to build a wall in the front largely constucted out of blasted rock and cement (possibly using grit from a beach). You fill this up with a couple of channels/pipes from the sea and it fills up during the tides. It just needs to be designed for say 10m head of water on the inlet side and not to withstand sea storms. Just thoughts dl

 

I do like a good bit of head....

The point about the peaks and troughs of the power supply from the Wind turbines is that they are not taking into account the extra expense required to smooth it out.

The bottom line is:
They are committing to something on a scale that no one has built before
In an impossible timescale
that will not supply the power they say it will
does not take into account where the energy will be stored / made up from
does not take into account the infrastructure to GET the power inland

It's an impossible pipe dream that an idiot politico has ignored the facts about and decided must happen

Maybe we should just vote King Canute into power and be done with it.

 

Ah the madness has truely begun!

 

Maybe the Earth Should just stand still....

 

OK, I see it now: what they are ACTUALLY up to is this:

Once it becomes OBVIOUS that the scheme is flawed,it will be too late to do anything else except build more nuclear power stations, which everyone, including the greens will have to accept

It's just Nu Labia spin after all then..........

Alcazar

 

I'm not sure what all the bickering is about, Homer Simpson has already built a perpetual energy machine using merely a piece of buttered toast teathered to the back of a cat.. Shell and BP own the rights to the design though

 

You are correct.. In the same way we will all be scrambling to addopt the Euro once the British economy has been finally screwed by Labour. They are not as stupid as we all think they are

Its always the same.. If the public dont want something just **** up the alternatives.. Dont want to scrap the NHS in favour of Private Health care and Insurance? Hell we'll just **** up the NHS you'll all be crying out for Private Health care.

 

The figures above don't add up.

If it would only take 6-7 nuclear plants to supply the whole country, then why would it take 12 to backup the wind plants?

Secondly, you don't over power with them and have to dump electricity. The blades are controllable pitch, if you're making too much power they're set to feather and it stops. Obviously that's a waste, so it would be better to sell your excess power.

It seems like a very one sided report with figures fudged to make it seem worse than it is.

 

But.. They dont always work (not enough wind) and they require MASSIVE ammounts of power to get them spinning in the first place...

 

You're new here, aren't you? It's a newspaper article which says the government is crap. Therefore, it must be true and accurate.

Not to be confused with newspaper articles which say the government is doing a good job, which are clearly distortions of the truth on a level only with Goebbelsian propaganda.

 

Thanks for that information Kieran, very interesting and yet another worry if it is all true.

This lot seem to be all blow and no go as Mrs Leslie would say.

Les

 

What was I thinking!

 

And all this from the Labour loving Telegraph

This is just another anti-Labour rant from the right wing press.

Incidentally Labour have committed this country to a new generation of Nuclear power stations, so I'm not sure why you needed to attack them onn that point either.

ITS ALL SPIN

 

David, The Scots were doing this 40 years ago

Didn't require ugly windfarms either... (Although admittedly Scotland has an advantage over Denmark in having high areas where the water can be pumped up to).

 

Many thanks for that. I didn't even know of its existence. And think how much more efficient turbines must be 40 years on.

I think that anyone standing on a beach looking out at an angry sea must be in awe of the potential energy that is there waiting to be tapped. And it's all free - that must have appealed to the Scots

d

 

There's an even bigger one in Wales, too AFAIK.

I don't think some of the posters on here realise just what a problem power surges are, nor the uneven demand.

It's the major reason why the link was built to France under the channel: we supply htem during their peak demand, which occurs before ours because they are one hour in advance of us. then they return the favour an hour later. It's got very litle to do with who has cheap power, or not.

Alcazar

 

There is, its called Denorwig HEP station.

 

It is rubbish, but do you think the Conservatives will be any less green?

Geezer