Britain's Lessons From The Winter of 2008-2009

Peter S (18:42:10) :
Those ‘ugly, motionless windmills popping up all over the countryside’ will be lasting monuments to the stupidity of the current British government.
I am not too sure if they will be lasting monuments?
I understand that windmills have a design life of “about twenty five years”.
So what happens when the twenty five years are up?
I have looked through a number of documents about wind farms, there is no mention of what is to happen to the windmill at the end of its active life.
I wonder why?
Living in southern Scotland we have our share of wind farms with more planned. How nice.
A close friend of mine is a hill farmer. He and his father were approached about to having wind turbines erected on their farm. There are a number of farms around them with wind turbines. For 25 years they would receive a payment for land use. After the 25 years the turbines would have to come down!!
Question
1. Who was responsible for taking the wind turbines down?
2. Who would clear the site?
3. Would the rubble be put into land fill?
If so who would pay?
As far as my friend was concerned he would be responsible for the clean up.
I am not sure if he is 100% correct. I am sure that I read that legally windmills need to be removed after twenty five years. I would look forward to any clarification or any references.

Phil’s Dad-
I’ve been feeding in to UK energy policy (at times on behalf of another government agency to what was the DETR) for over twenty years, monitoring all the consultation documents and their results in government policy. Since the Royal Commission report ‘Energy and Climate’ our policy has been driven by the IPCC dogma – without a single decent critical review (as for example, the US National Academy of Sciences did in 2001). Its hard to find the words to describe the ineptitude. Firstly, the policy has been ‘supply side’ oriented on the assumption that energy demand will for ever increase, and ‘demand side’ policies avoided -presumably because some very large energy businesses would suffer.
A single act of reducing motorway speed limits to 65mph and enforcing them, and 55mph on all other roads, with a 50mph enforced limit on trucks and vans, would have saved more than all the wind turbines combined. The Royal Commission recommended micro-generation and a decentralised grid – yet these technologies are not being furthered. Instead a 2000MW gas plant is scheduled for Pembroke and a series of new 1000+ GW nukes.
Wind is being pushed – despite the need for subsidies – it is about 3x the cost of gas or coal, but solar is 10x, wave would be similarly expensive. We lose a landscape, divide communities and give people the impression something is being done – and so they simply use more ‘renewable’ energy.
Further – when companies that have both wind and coal/gas stations get the credits for wind, they can sell them on the European market, thus allowing more carbon dioxide to be emitted elsewhere by dirty companies eager not to have the expense of curbing their emisisons!!!
The policy is destructive of crucial elements of sustainability – rural life, biodiversity, landscape beauty – but these do not count when measured against the bureaucratic policy targets of the EU (and IPCC).
The really sad thing is that NONE of these renewable energy or other carbon reduction strategies can have ANY effect on climate (even within the IPCC model) until well-past 2050. And if IPCC are wrong (which they surely are) then they will be all for nothing in terms of making the world a safer place.
What we do need is a steady transition to a future of increasing population stress on resources, especially food, higher oil costs and depleting supply, and a climate that may cool just as much as it may warm. We need to build resilience.
This is standard thinking in ecological policy areas but it does not penetrate the wonkers in energy policy who are technology oriented and overly influenced by the interests of big energy corporations.
Its great that you are listening to the debate we are having on climate mechanisms, but sensible policy assumes uncertainty and looks for no-regrets options – things that will be of benefit whichever way the climate turns.
And for all you coal freaks….some stations in the UK burn about 4 million tonnes a year. Lead, cadmium, mercury, uranium, thorium….occur in parts per million in coal and a lot gets past the filters – that’s tonnes of highly toxic metals into the atmosphere. It mostly drifts and rains down on the sea, where it is absorbed by the sea surface microlayer. Pipette a few square metres of this oily layer into your tropical fish tank and watch the fish die.
Coal is not clean or green. Gas and oil will run out. Nuclear generates waste – and look again at Harrisburg – if the containment had fractured, Pennsylvania would be a nature reserve just like the vast area downwind of Chernobyl. Biofuels – there isn’t enough land, unless you do what Chinese sovereign funds are doing and buy it from peasants elsewhere – like 1.3 million acres of Madagascar.
The answer is to lower consumption and accept a contracting physical economy. Nobody knows how to do that and maintain stability and a decent cooperative lifestyle. Maybe that will come only after a prolonged economic downturn has set the collective mind onto another track.

Similar to the UK, here in Michigan as well as much of the Great Lakes area, along with the Northern Plains and Northern New England states, have experienced one of the coldest January’s in decades.
Along this subject, I came across something very interesting to note with regards to the Arbor Day Foundation’s new “global warming adjusted” tree planting zones. It is highly possible, that due to these changes, the Arbor Day Foundation could actually be killing trees.
If people used the updated “global warming adjusted” planting zones issued in 2006 to select varieties of trees to plant here in the Northern USA, chances are pretty high, that many of those trees could have winter killed this winter. So its possible that the Arbor Day Foundation, might actually be killing trees with its “global warming propaganda”.
“New arborday.org Hardiness Zone Map reflects warmer climate
Latest hardiness zones, based on most current temperature data available, suggest up-to-date choices for best trees to plant
“Nebraska City, Neb. – Much of the United States has been warmer in recent years, and that affects which trees are right for planting.
“Based on the latest comprehensive weather station data, The Arbor Day Foundation has just released a new 2006 arborday.org Hardiness Zone Map which separates the country into ten different temperature zones to help people select the right trees to plant where they live.
The new map reflects that many areas have become warmer since 1990 when the last USDA hardiness zone map was published.
The new 2006 arborday.org Hardiness Zone Map is consistent with the consensus of climate scientists that global warming is underway.
In response to requests for up-to-date information, the Arbor Day Foundation developed the new zones based on the most recent 15 years’ data available from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 5,000 National Climatic Data Center cooperative stations across the United States. Hardiness zones are based on average annual low temperatures using 10 degree increments.
http://www.arborday.org/media/zonechanges2006.cfm
http://www.arborday.org/media/map_change.cfm
P.S. Anthony, this might make a great story for your website. Feel free to use it if you want.

Rachel (03:29:48) :
“The UK has been experiencing the coldest winter in several decades”
That’s simply a lie. Of course, ~snip~ do not question claims that fit in with their beliefs. That is one of the ways to spot a ~snip~.
It most simply is not a lie Rachel, what are you basing your claim on? Even the Met Office accept that it has been the coldest winter for at least a decade (and that was at the beginning of February)
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2009/pr20090130.html

Peter Taylor,
what you are advocating is a return to middle age and the elimination of half the world population. hrard that plan before but is not so popular, expecially with those who will have to go.
“Nuclear generates waste – and look again at Harrisburg – if the containment had fractured, Pennsylvania would be a nature reserve just like the vast area downwind of Chernobyl”
do you know the amount of high level radioactive waste produced by a 1 GW nuclear power station in one year, after reprocessing? do you know the pro capita amount of high level radioactive waste if all energy was produced with nuclear? do the maths, you will be surprised.
it is true that coal is not clean. i would surely go for nuclear on a large scale; is cheap, safe, and virtually unlimited, using the right technology. chernobyl cannot be used to demonstrate nuclear is unsafe, the same as a brakeless bus driven by a drunk monkry can be used to demonstrate the dangers of transport.
nuke dont produce CO2 (not that i believe CO2 is a problem) so why environmentalists dont wont it?

Kevin B
really good idea.

We often get prolongued periods of cold, foggy & windless weather here, making these damned windmills less than useless.
Their optimum windspeed is 33mph, upland UK average is 22mph, lowland a mere 11mph.
Looking out of my window today, shows a view of a cool, damp, cloudy Lincolnshire day, with scarcely a breath of wind.
The stats for windpower’s contribution to the UK’s power output are out there somewhere.
One letter published in The Daily Telegraph, noted a mere 0.5% contribution during the cold period at the start of January.
With respect to wave power, one supposes that the issue is where to put these generators so that they won’t interfere with shipping and how to prevent marine growth fouling them, if this is shown to significantly reduce their efficiency.
There is a 1.4% increase in mortality, for every 1C reduction in temperature below 18C, each 1C reduction in winter average air temperature leads to 5,000 excess deaths nationally.
http://www.networks.nhs.uk/uploads/cold%20illness%20admission%20and%20winter%20mortality%20W%20Yorks%20presentation.ppt
Cold costs us too, another Telegraph article noted a £1.5 billion cost to the UK’s economy due to the unusually cold period we’ve experienced as of late.
We certainly do need to insulate our houses better, whether it is to keep warm in winter (The period between about September & July!) or cool in Summer (Occurs for a week in May, then a few days in July and August).

Paul S “Rachel, also reports out of China for their coldest winter in 100 years…” that article is from last year.

Thank you one and all – keep it coming
Lots of these comments deserve answers but I will limit myself to one for now.
JimB: asks
Could you explain the “very real, life-threatening, risk” ?
There are risks to both sides but for now I will concentrate on the risk of limiting energy in order to slow the growth in CO2.
Until aneutronic fusion or some other clean technology can provide cheap, unlimited, fine grain, distributed power; “life as we know it” depends on hydrocarbon combustion. This will be increasingly so for the people of developing countries who do not currently enjoy “life as we know it”.
Africa for example is home to getting on for a billion people. Only 10% have regular energy supplies. Nor is it evenly distributed. In some African countries 95% go without.
Instead many spend their time gathering grass, dung and, where available, wood for cooking and heating. Four million die each year from the lung infections that result. W.H.O. figures indicate that this is forty times higher than the number of smoking-related deaths. The greatest effect is felt by women and children.
Without the power to pump clean water, what can be found is carried home, often from distant lakes and rivers. Tainted water and spoiled, unrefrigerated, food cause intestinal diseases that kill another two million annually. These things alone are killing numbers equivalent to the population of London or New York, every year, as a direct result of the absence of practical, affordable energy. Right now “practical, affordable” means hydrocarbons.
To set this in context; the most major of the world wide environmental initiatives to date, the Kyoto Protocol, would apparently keep two million people from going hungry by the end of the century. A third of the number that will die, this year, from lack of energy.
Other environmental initiatives have actually made matters worse. In recent years the colossal increase in bio-fuel crops, which effectively put food into cars, drove up food prices. The World Bank states that this has driven at least 30 million more people into hunger.
I am very much aware that politics is in large part responsible for what I have described above. As such I am clear that we must not make matters worse still with more politics. To those who say we must reduce world energy consumption as a route to reducing CO2; I would ask them to consider that unnecessarily limiting or withholding energy damages peoples’ lives and, in some cases, takes those lives away. By all means let us develop low carbon, high energy economies but please not low carbon, low energy.
By all means secure energy supplies by developing local alternatives to imported oil and gas. Do not under any circumstances waste resources. But before suggesting that developed nations reduce their energy usage – please take a long hard look at countries that are low energy today.
It is not sufficient to say “we will do this because of what might happen in the future if we don’t” when we know full well ‘what will happen if we do’ could be every bit as bad or even worse.
To put it harshly, do we let someone die now on the off chance we might save someone later? You need to be very sure of your ground before making that sort of decision. You can’t just accept the consensus.
So I am listening, with an open mind, to both sides and adjusting policy as I learn more. But I am by no means able to say “one side is 100% wrong and the other 100% right”. I hope I never am because that would be when I stop listening.

I think home backup power generators are a great investment opportunity for the coming years. As the USA blunders away from cheap, reliable sources of power to expensive, unreliable and experimental sources, people are going to want to have some way to keep the lights on.

I read comments concerning Australia’s heat wave, and at least one person pointed out that it was indeed a “heat wave.”
My observation for Summer ’08 in the Northern Hemisphere was that it was the mildest and most pleasant Summer I can remember. My wife and I had a deck built that Spring which required a new door that faces West. I had concerns about a West facing door. We live in Arkansas (USA) and all of the nastiest storms come from the West due to the jet stream. Well, we left that door open for most of the year and only ran the AC for a few hours per day. Y’all I can’t remember ever doing that before. And the breeze! The fresh breeze that blew all through the house with windows and doors open.
Why say all this? Well, during that Summer we also had a “heat wave” where the temperatures flirted with three digits. It lasted for almost 2 weeks. The humidity shot sky high, too. We shut the doors, closed the windows and cranked up the AC. I remember saying to my wife, “Well, we had it good while it lasted but Summer is finally here.” Then the heat wave ended, the temperature dropped back down, the doors and windows opened back up, and the AC was shut off for nearly 20 hours a day. Sure, we had some hot days ever now and again, but it was mostly pleasant.
One heat wave does not a Hades make.