Alternative Energy in Britain: All Wind And No Farm
Surrounded by water, with strong winds blowing in from the Atlantic Ocean, Great Britain is a blustery place. There’s nothing quite like an invigorating walk along the cliff-tops to blow away the cobwebs.
I was reminded of this on a recent Sunday afternoon visit to the Portland Bill lighthouse on the South coast of England (pictured), since despite the brilliant sunshine one needed a concerted effort to walk headlong into the howling wind. Talking above the constant noise of wind and sea was almost impossible, and local people tell me this is by no means unusual here.
Yet despite being a desolate place with enough wind energy blowing through every day to provide a significant portion of local energy needs, you won’t find a single wind turbine at Portland today. Nor anywhere else along the windy Dorset coast for that matter.
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Despite British government commitments to generate 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, proposals for wind turbine installations tend to run aground pretty quickly once local opposition is voiced. “Inefficient, Wasteful and Wrong Headed” shouts one local magazine article. “Money over common sense” states Dorset Against Rural Turbines, along with pictures of dead birds and videos of exploding windmills.
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Two thirds of the UK Government’s climate change targets have been missed, and it’s renewable energy targets look set to join that list. People want digital TV recorders, plug-in hybrid vehicles, wide-screen TV’s and a multitude of other devices which contribute towards increasing energy demands. Unfortunately they don’t want nuclear power, dirty coal fired power stations, wind turbines, off-shore tidal barrages, or any other form of energy production - unless it is situated somewhere else.
Protestors often like to point out that each individual wind farm will have an insignificant impact on energy production and CO2 reductions. Sadly, this is an often used argument in environmental discussions - cars only contribute to 6% of Britain’s CO2 output, so let’s leave those alone, aviation only 8%, so let’s forget that, and so on and so forth.
No Magic Solution
Unfortunately, there will be no magic solution to clean energy. Just as CO2 emissions will ultimately need to be reduced from every source, so will every form of clean energy be required to meet our increasing needs. This means that everybody has a role to play, and many people will need to accept renewable energy as a fact of life.
Wind farms in places such as Portland Bill are inevitable, but what’s avoidable are the lost opportunities. Countries such as Denmark and Germany have embraced wind power, producing significant quantities of electricity by wind (almost 20% of the total requirement in Denmark’s case) and have become world leaders in wind power technology and manufacturing.
Meanwhile, Britain will continue to argue, and the wind will continue to blow..
Image credit: leo_leibovici at Flickr under a Creative Commons license
Hi,
As mentioned in this blog, Flanders (Belgium) doesn’t invest in wind mills at all. We’ve only 123 units. On top of that, as a private person, it’s rather impossible to install a private wind mill.
Eddy
Why does Britain keep up the illusion that wind power makes any sense? I see that Germany and now Denmark have pretty much given up on this most useless and primitive manes of making small amounts of unreliable, uncontrollable electricity, all in favor of nuclear. Perhaps the anti-nukes have finally been seen as the cause of carbon emissions for the past 30 years, when nucelar construction was blocked by these hysterical extremists. I calculate that wind costs between 4 and 10 times more than nuclear to build, and that nuclear fuel goes for less than 1/2 cent (US) per kilowatthour.
Your two previous commentators seem disconnected from facts.
Eddy says ‘Flanders doesn’t invest in wind mills at all. We’ve only 123 units’. At all v. 123 windmills?
Bradshaw apparently hasn’t seen recent posts about lifetime costs of nukes.
http://polizeros.com/2008/08/11/wind-energy-becoming-as-cost-effective-as-nuclear/
Fuel cycle costs not carbon free, and sites need forever care, along with health care for contaminated miners. Stranded facilities need care for millenia once they’ve worn out with constant costs, and the post-generation fuel cycle management costs last as long, v. none of those for wind and solar. And there are ongoing efforts to design transmission/distribution systems to accommodate varying wind resources over broad geographic areas to improve reliability of supply.
Current windmill designs are visual problems, but at least don’t stink and pollute like fossil plants, or leave thousands of years of legacy costs like nukes.
Wind needs capture by better devices.
I don’t see why GF Bird says that I’m disconnected from facts. Did he read the blog I’ve mentioned? The 123 units is a fact. And it seems the that monopolist power supplier doesn’t want to shut down the nuclear plants as you can read in this blog for commercial and not environmental reasons.
[...] Original Article: Alternative Energy in Britain: All Wind And No Farm [...]
Once nuclear power supporters find out union wage demands for mining the goddam dangerous dirty and deadly ore, and add dead and dying miners to their list of environmental casualties for their a**hole obsession with death, and then add in the horrendous environmental damage of radioactive tailings and waste rock from the mines, they may get a closer look at the real cost of nuclear power stations. Canada traditionally hires unsuspecting D.P.s or other ignorant immigrants to mine the damn dirty and deadly stuff of reactors, perhaps they would like to come on over and do the dirty work themselves? We Canadians are accustom to them coming, welcome them with open arms, send our daughters and sons to medical school just to care for them, make coffins and hold very fancy funerals in elaborate funeral homes for them and have made a good living on selling them and theirs, life insurance, shady mortgages and cars. We indigenous Canadians are well established and don’t have to go to the mines to earn a living. We don’t cross streets without looking either!
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