"... a senior Conservative energy minister admitted last night as he warned 'enough is enough.'"
John Hayes said that we can “no longer have wind turbines imposed on communities” and added that it “seems extraordinary” they have allowed to spread so much throughout the country.
The energy minister said he had ordered a new analysis of the case for onshore wind power which would form the basis of future government policy, rather than “a bourgeois Left article of faith based on some academic perspective.”...
“We can no longer have wind turbines imposed on communities. I can’t single-handedly build a new Jerusalem but I can protect our green and pleasant land.”
That last sentence is a reference to
the poem by William Blake.
The poem was inspired by the apocryphal story that a young Jesus, accompanied by his uncle Joseph of Arimathea, a tin merchant, travelled to what is now England and visited Glastonbury during Jesus' lost years. The legend is linked to an idea in the Book of Revelation.... describing a Second Coming, wherein Jesus establishes a new Jerusalem. The Christian Church in general, and the English Church in particular, used Jerusalem as a metaphor for Heaven, a place of universal love and peace.
Are there wind turbines in Heaven?
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37 comments:
Gasbags, yes.
Wind turbines, no.
Dark satanic windmills!
Ironic.
As the Church of England dies for lack of faith, Environmentalism rises in its stead. (And isn't it funny how completely material, and pedestrian, the Left's utopia really is, and how it far more often produces dystopia?)
And so Britain gets bird-killing machines that look like they came from Star Wars.
Some, no doubt, believe this to be progress.
Heaven is filled with wind turbines, Chevy volts, and Solyndra pannels and good feelings and everyone agrees and is good and pure.
The turbines there, as here, are sold on the virtues of their electrical production "capacity." Capacity is defined as sustained winds of 24 mph. Actual winds blow at about 25% of that speed on average.
Again, an overhyped technology sold to gullible politicians who ram them down the throats of the citizens.
Blowhards are not allowed in Heaven.
When I first saw a wind farm in the California coastal hills in the 80s, I thought they were pretty awesome. But it was desolate there anyway.
NIMBY
Are there wind turbines in Heaven?
Yes. Unfortunately thousands of angels are killed each year by flying into them.
Are there wind turbines in Heaven?
Don't know.
But I'm pretty sure there are no gasbags and foghorns.
Op! I was on Allen S's wavelength.
And Ellen's. But Ellen obviously has issue with Heaven.
Decades ago when I first saw them here while driving in California, I said wow, thats an amazing sight, how cool is that! On the return trip, I said: That has no future, it's ugly as hell after you get over the novelty. Nobody is gonna want that on the skyline forever. That was long before I realized how obnoxious they sound. We may find a way to harness wind power, but I don't think windmills is it. It's a dead end, except far off shore.
It will be a long time before we come up with anything as powerful, clean and unobtrusive as nuclear power. We have really screwed the pooch by not putting more energy into perfecting that. That failure was based in foolish emotionalism from an unscientific, loud, and silly constituency that is constantly accomplishing the opposite of its stated goals due to unintended consequences it seem unable to learn from.
bagoh20 said...
It will be a long time before we come up with anything as powerful, clean and unobtrusive as nuclear power. We have really screwed the pooch by not putting more energy into perfecting that.
How dare we save a half million or so lives by not invading Japan?
/sarc
The Lefties have opposed nucular solely because of Hiroshima, but bag is right. Properly managed, it's perfectly safe.
Wind power is pretty much the ultimate in useless, feel-good environmentalism.
Worse than useless, actually, since your windmills have to be backed up 100% by gas and the variability that wind induces on the grid reduces the efficiency of your gas generators.
Overall, it's a massive waste of resources. Purposely inducing random variability on your power grid is just dumb.
I have been told that even when the wind is blowing and the farms are working full power, the power companies have to keep a conventional plant idling along, ready to kick in any time the wind falls off.
The conventional plant cannot be shut down, because once it is off, it takes a long time to get it fired up again, and running one at idle is nearly as expensive as running it at full power.
The savings from wind farms are as elusive as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow!
edutcher,
I was recently reading about the whole decision about dropping the bomb. Apparently the studies that the Japanese did in preparing for the planned U.S. invasion expected tens of millions of dead Japanese, and they were prepared to do that anyway. Ironically, those two horrific bombs may have saved more lives than anything in history.
From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
"The Vice Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy General Staff, Vice Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi, predicted up to 20 million Japanese deaths."
The U.S. expectation:
"Wright and Shockley estimated the invading Allies would suffer between 1.7 and 4 million casualties in such a scenario, of whom between 400,000 and 800,000 would be dead, while Japanese casualties would have been around 5 to 10 million.
We have a large array of those unsightly, bird killing, windmills on top of a mountainous ridge. You can see them from practically everywhere. they are an ugly blight on the horizon. The people fought tooth and nail to NOT have them installed, to no avail. Shove the windmills right up our ass.
California made a mandate that 30% (I think) of all energy provided by PG&E must come from "renewable" sources. So the windfarms that are tax payer subsidized are foisted on PG&E and they HAVE to buy their power at higher prices per KWH than the cost of producing Hydro Power which is the main source of electricity in California.
California in all of it's head up it's ass wackery, decided that Hydro, water power, the cheapest power around produced by plants that have been in operation for over half a century..... would not be considered renewable.
Therefore, when the windmills are running, chopping up eagles, the hydro plant shuts down because of the regulations.
More expensive wind power. Shut down the hydro. All of our bills go up and more and more tax payer dollars go to companies to subsidize the wind and solar. Win win for the green energy companies. Too bad about the rate payers.
Genius!!! Not.
There are no wind turbines in Heaven--not even climate-change heaven.
Wind energy has to be backed up by hydro--already carbon-neutral--or by natural gas, because wind is variable and coal and nuclear can't be stopped and started quickly enough.
Everyone can see that when a wind plant is running at 0%, you need 25% of the wind capacity to back it up. What is harder to see, is that when the wind is running at 100%, you need the equivalent of 75% to pull OFF the grid.
So when you build a 1 GW wind plant, you expect it to supply on the average 0.25 GW, and you need 0.75 GW already in the grid to back it up.
So every wind plant displaces 25 - 75% of its rated maximum capacity in hydro or natural gas.
Washington State is about 80% hydro. Since they built wind in a big way, Washington's carbon emissions went up, because they had to build natural gas to back up the wind.
The delusion that "renewable power" replaces carbon based energy is a Religion designed by a corrupt priesthood to enrich themselves at the expense of fools who believe them.
The fools think it works, but it does not. The fools think it is cleaner, but it is not.The fools think it is saving us from warming, but it is not.
Bill Clinton wants to take the profitable new religion's prophet job from AlGore and cash in big time.
Meanwhile global cooling marches on.
Are there wind turbines in Heaven?
I don't know, but there are plenty of abandoned ones at South Point on the Big Island of Hawaii: link
DBQ, and I would like to offer California as a clear example of why liberal Democrats are dangerous and irresponsible. The example is pretty clear and will get clearer in the near future as we are still ruled entirely by the Democratic party and they are incapable of learning or admitting a mistake. Our state, one of the largest economies in the world, is currently unsustainable solely due to incredibly stupid public policy, and will go bankrupt. Take notice.
Jerusalem is also the anthem of the England cricket team. Although I'm I diehard West Indies cricket fan, I get chills hearing the the Barmy Army - a mostly drunken group of fans that travel around the world with the English team - deliver rousing renditions of Jerusalem.
Unfortunately since the West Indies isn't an actual single nation we don't have an anthem and use a calypso "Rally 'round the West Indies" instead.
DBQ,
I don't think you are quite right. I think hydro power is like coal in that you can take them off line, but you have to keep them running. Re-starting turbines and generators is not an instantaneous process.
"there are plenty of abandoned ones at South Point on the Big Island of Hawaii:"
That's one of my favorite places. Very open, beautiful high cliffs at the shore, and incredibly windy. It's an eerie, awesome place. Like Kansas at the edge of the earth. I've been there a bunch of times, and the first time was before those turbines were there. The last time I was there they were all not running and most were huge busted rusting hulks. They are enormous. Still, when you turn your back on them it's wonderfully beautiful.
Here's photo I took with the turbines far in the distance:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bagoh20/8141944245/
bagoh20 said...
"DBQ, and I would like to offer California as a clear example of why liberal Democrats are dangerous and irresponsible. The example is pretty clear and will get clearer in the near future as we are still ruled entirely by the Democratic party and they are incapable of learning or admitting a mistake. Our state, one of the largest economies in the world, is currently unsustainable solely due to incredibly stupid public policy, and will go bankrupt. Take notice."
Smart people already note California's failures.
Dumb people never will.
Their ideology defies reason; it is entirely faith-based, with no room for dissent, fact or reason.
California will continue to fail, getting progressively worse, and liberals across American will continue to vote for politicians promoting the same agenda killing California, immune to the lessons, ignorant of the facts, willfully blind to California's reality.
Just watch.
I don't think you are quite right. I think hydro power is like coal in that you can take them off line, but you have to keep them running. Re-starting turbines and generators is not an instantaneous process.
You may be correct in that they are not "shut down" in the sense that they stop everything. [I don't know much about the mechanics of it and am relaying what the guys say, who work at the local hydro plant] The water still goes through the turbines as it always does, but the power is not generated. Something about the line/load not being able to handle both the wind and hydro at the same time [?].
The point being, however, is that they stop sending out the cheapest, cleanest and steadiest power, when the unreliable and expensive wind farms are running.
Who ever decided that hydro power was not a renewable, clean energy should be shot.
@DBQ:Something about the line/load not being able to handle both the wind and hydro at the same time [?].
Power in has to equal power out. There's no cost-effective way to store large amounts of electricity, except in the form of water behind a reservoir.
Power in has to equal power out. There's no cost-effective way to store large amounts of electricity, except in the form of water behind a reservoir.
Yes, I know this. I'm quite aware that there is no cost effective way to 'store' the power :-{
My POINT is that PGE is required to stop generating or "delivering" the inexpensive hydro power from existing plants, when the expensive windpower is being generated or is on line.
They are mandated by the morons in Sacramento to BUY and to deliver the more expensive power as a certain percentage of ALL of their power delivered......AND someone has decided that hydro is not a "renewable" source of energy, when hydro is the cleanest and in our area the steadiest and most reliable consistent source of power.
So....PG&E is extorted to BUY or produce themselves by building new facilities the expensive power and the costs are passed onto us poor rate payers.
The entire idea makes zero sense in terms of 'global warming' when the already built plants are bypassed for new 'green' facilities which mostly had their components built in China at a huge carbon footprint cost. You think China is concerned about their pollution or carbon footprint. Hardly.
Foolish, hypocritical, deluded......basically describes the California liberal agenda.
Chariots burn out so quickly.
Green is good whenever the government shoves it down your fucking throat.
'Michael' said, "The turbines there, as here, are sold on the virtues of their electrical production "capacity." Capacity is defined as sustained winds of 24 mph. Actual winds blow at about 25% of that speed on average."
It's truly a conspiracy caused by the physics of wind power. That is, The energy available to a wind turbine is proportional to the CUBE of the wind speed. So if they're designed to work well in moderate winds (as they must be, to have a reasonable capacity) then they'll be all but useless at low wind velocities.
But the dishonesty doesn't stop there. When they talk about how much electricity a wind facility generates over the course of a year, they're talking about the GROSS energy production, not the NET.
Because, wind turbines themselves consume energy, even when they're not generating any. They have hydraulic systems to keep them turned into the wind, and they have control electronics on board, and in cold weather the gearcase oil must be heated (and sometimes the leading edge of the blades as well). And if you've ever seen a wind turbine slowly revolving on a windless day, it was because it had to do that to avoid damage/deformation of its primary bearings.
Of course, the power used by the wind turbine doesn't come from the turbine itself, because that power is not reliable. It comes from (where else) the grid. Which is to say, a wind turbine consumes reliable power and gives back unreliable, intermittantly-available power.
But in any case, wind promoters invariably quote only the power produced by the wind turbine without subtracting the power it needs to operate.
Gabriel, are you sure about WA? Hydro is as fast-starting as anything, at least most dams can be operated as peaking plants.
@bagoh2): I was there last year with my family. Your photo looks like it was taken from where they fish. There were underground ladders leading down through lava tunnels to the water so that people could access small boats.
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