First the promise, perhaps a bit overrated:
The article goes on to say:
The borough already has one publicly-owned turbine — a 33ft Air Dolphin turbine at a location off Taylors Lane, Oldbury, near the civic amenities site in Shidas Lane.
Through monitoring the performance of the turbine it was hoped the council would be able to find out how practical it would be to harness wind power on a large scale in the borough
Here is what it looks like:
Interestingly, right below the picture on this sale page for the wind turbine, they say this:
With the average price for 1kWh of electricity in the UK at around 11 pence, this wind turbine is predicted to save its owner just £55 to £154 per year giving a pay back period of 45 to 125 years!
I kid you not, that’s actually what they say. In tips and notes, UK blogger Derek Sorensen calls our attention to this FOI request regarding the production of the very same wind turbine on Taylors Lane, Oldbury.
Source: http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/wind_turbine#incoming-163689
Roy Mccauley
Sandwell Borough Council
31 March 2011
Thank you for your enquiry about the Taylor’s Lane wind turbine in
Oldbury. The answers to your questions are as follows:
1) Could you please tell me the total cost spent on purchase and
installation of the 33ft Air Dolphin turbine at a location off Taylor’s
Lane, Oldbury?
£5,000 (plus VAT) was the total cost of the Taylor’s Lane micro wind
turbine in Oldbury, including foundations, tower and connections.
2) Could you also tell me how much has been spent on the turbine since?
Nothing has needed to be spent since it was installed.
3) How much electricity has been generated by the turbine and how much has
been spent monitoring the performance of the turbine – e.g. cost of
setting up a computer/software etc.
No money has been spent monitoring the performance of the micro wind
turbine at Taylor’s Lane.
However, the council paid £750 for 3 years of monitoring an identical
micro wind turbine at Bleakhouse Primary School in Oldbury. We chose to
monitor just one of the turbines to minimise costs. We wanted to track
performance, establish whether predicted wind speeds in Sandwell were
accurate and use the technology and readings for educational purposes in
schools.
For the 12 months between May 2009 and April 2010, the Bleakhouse Primary
School micro wind turbine generated 209 kWh of electricity.
If you are dissatisfied with the handling of your request, you have the
right to ask for an internal review. Internal review requests should be
submitted within two months of the date of receipt of the response to your
request, and should be addressed to:
Freedom of Information Unit
Oldbury Council House
Freeth Street
Oldbury
West Midlands
B69 3DE
Email – [1][Sandwell Borough Council request email]
If you are not content with the outcome of an internal review, you have
the right to apply directly to the Information Commissioner for a
decision. The Information Commissioner can be contacted at:
Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire SK9 5AF
Please remember to quote your reference number above in any future
communications.
Roy McCauley
Sustainable & Economic Regeneration Unit
======================================================
Dereke writes:
Sandwell Borough Council paid £5,000 a pop to install several wind turbines in their area, and then paid another £750 to have the output of just one of them monitored.
The monitored turbine, which was installed on a primary school, generated 209kWh of electricity in the twelve months it was being monitored. That’s about 20 quid’s worth. So each turbine will have to run for 250 years without breaking down or requiring maintainance, just to break even.
Such a deal. Since the FOI request was granted on March 31st, and the Express and Star News story was February 24th, do you think the Sandwell council may have had time to consider these massive energy production figures for their toy £5000 toy turbine?
Over50 says:
April 27, 2011 at 12:59 pm
I think they should install a windmill in London’s Olympic Park that is rated for, and the sole source of energy for, the main scoreboard/video screen. The fact that the scoreboard and video screen is solely powered by the windmill should be noted on all TV broadcasts continuously throughout the games. Further, TV should only broadcast results as and when displayed by this official scoreboard. I believe this could be a real teaching moment.
——————————-
Awesome idea. Heck, why stop there? Swimming events could be measured by exclusively solar powered timeclocks, lights and power for indoor events could be reliant on solar, wind, bicycles etc. The possibilities are endless. Here is the great opportunity to demonstrate what a truly Green Games would be like!
Smokey says: April 27, 2011 at 9:41 am…….”
Smokey,
Yep, I get a $.315 kwh benefit (via my E-7 net meter rate schedule from PG&E, in the winter my benefit drops to .12 kwh) for each kwh I can send to the grid during peak times in the summer. The benefit is a credit towards my yearly bill from PG&E. Unlike the folks who gave us the securitized debt mess I was/am at risk as well. If I can’t manage my electrical load during during peak hours, then I pay a minimum of $.315 a kwh (the max is something around $.59 kwh if I jump up to Tier 4 usage) for the energy I use from the grid. I had to make a choice back in 2005, continue to pay PG&E’s progressive tier 3, 4 and 5 energy prices while living in the country here in CA, or I could invest in some self generation. I live in the country and pump my water up from a depth of about 300 feet. The Tier 1, monthly baseline energy amounts from PG&E that do not take into account the power needs of those of us who run wells for their water supply.
I figured it was a lost cause trying to get PG&E and the CPUC to consider that I wasn’t really wasting energy to run my well pump. I would of preferred to pay the LAPUD electrical rates ($.072 kwh for unlimited usage in this winter) but that wasn’t an option. I was aware that the state was committed to obtaining 20% of it’s electrical generation from RE by 2010. To pay the extra costs of the RE generation I assumed that PG&E and the PUC would be following the approach they did in 2005- allocate the higher generation costs for renewables or any other improvement to the higher Tier (3,4, and 5) residential users. In hind site that did turn out to be the case. So my choice was do I pay super premium prices for years for my electrical usage or do I try to limit my grid demand to baseline levels and cover the extra kwh usage with self generation. My location doesn’t have any steady wind to speak of so that left PV as an option for us.
If I (or any PV self generation residential user) ever happens to send more energy to the grid then they use the benefit will be something like $.09 a kwh. Sorry for not being clear on what my benefits and risks are with my PV system and the rate schedule I am on. As to what my benefits will be in the future- it is my understanding that PG&E and the PUC can change rates as they deem necessary. What the can’t do is change my E-7 net metering schedule prices separately from the e-7 metering schedule- hence PG&E will be crediting me what they would of charged me at peak times for some time to come.
Gary Hladik says:
April 27, 2011 at 4:17 pm
Paul Birch says (April 27, 2011 at 3:17 pm): “I doubt if it would make much difference to the overall cost, which at such a small scale is dominated by the installation and monitoring costs, not the simple hardware price.”
“Um, Paul, you don’t think it would be a lot cheaper to install an off-the-shelf logger than a wind turbine?”
No, I don’t. As I have already pointed out, most of the cost will be in the planning, organisation, construction, installation and operation. The cost of the hardware is trivial. The overall cost might well have come out higher, because instead of using the mast that comes with the turbine, it would have been necessary to source a similar mast separately.
“BTW, note from the FOI response that the council was willing to give up data to save the relatively small cost of monitoring a second turbine, when according to your argument, it wouldn’t be worthwhile. WUWT?”
The data was being collected; they didn’t need to collect it twice. My guess is that they originally planned to monitor the turbine they installed at the rubbish dump, then realised that there was another turbine already available at the school (funded separately through the school authorities) which would do just as well instead, and give some educational benefit to boot. There’s a good chance they got a special deal on the monitoring because it was at an educational establishment (£750 is astonishingly cheap for three years, and would barely pay for the set up costs). Had they realised this earlier, they could presumably have saved the cost of the second turbine, but different departments can’t know everything that every other department is doing; better liason unfortunately costs a lot to manage, so it’s actually cheaper to accept that there will inevitably be some duplication and mixed messages.
“Also, a wind logger (which was probably included in their monitoring setup at the school) doesn’t by itself tell you how a real turbine will react to that wind.”
“Not directly, but it will predict the turbine’s expected performance, given its advertised specifications. Judging by the turbine’s dismal output, a wind logger alone would have settled the issue (unless of course the council bought defective turbines, in which case it should get a refund). Note that the council could have passed a two-step plan (phase 1: check wind; phase 2: install test turbines only if phase 1 successful) with the same (apparently arduous) bureaucratic effort, and saved a bundle.”
First, I don’t believe the ridiculously low 209kWh figure. Installations around the world produce around 20-30% of nameplate capacity; very few fall much outside this range; and certainly not as low as 2.3%. So why do people find it so hard to accept that it could be a simple typo?
Second, the two-phase plan you suggest would not have “saved a bundle”. My experience argues that it would probably have cost nearly twice as much.
Gary Hladik says:
April 27, 2011 at 5:08 pm
Paul Birch says (April 27, 2011 at 3:35 pm): “No, but I am a local town councillor, so I know how much it costs to get these things done in reality. £5K +£750 for monitoring is a very good deal. And I repeat, local authorities do not pay VAT.”
“I just looked back at the FoI response. According to Roy Mccauley of the Sandwell Borough Council, the cost of one wind turbine (Taylor’s Lane) was £5,ooo “plus VAT”. WUWT?”
When local authorities purchase goods and services from VAT-registered firms, the invoiced amount includes VAT. The local authority then claims back this VAT from HM Revenue and Customs. There is no cost to the local authority or council tax payers. As far as councils’ net budgeting is concerned, they do not pay VAT.
@paul birch
Sorry – your continued pleading about this whole shambles being a good deal is digging yourself even deeper into the more and reflects no credit on your judgment as a guardian of public finance.
Let’s remind ourselves of what was trying to be acheived. A very simple task. Find out how much the wind blows over the course of a year in a particular location in Oldbury. There are commercial devices to do this in the price range of £200 including software. Buy one. Stick it in the top of a pole. connect it to a PC with a big notice ‘do not switch off”. Come back in a year and collect the data.
Even the most gormless local government officer shouldn;t need more than a couple of days max to do this. It is not hard. It is not rocket science. It is not stretching technology to new limits. It does not need inter-departmental cooperation beyond Fred telling Charlie. I guarantee it will get planning permission without problems.
And best of all the benighted ‘sustainability officer’ is being paid for anyway. His time is effectively free.
If you bought the useless £5,000 device instead of the £200 useful device none of the above stages would change. It would just be £4,800 cheaper. The expenditure of taxpayers money would be £4,800 less. You would have saved money. Less would have gone out.
If in your council, your own sustaianbility officers ahev managed to persuade you that there is anything more difficult here than set out above, then I fear that you have stopped representing your electorate and effectively become a staff member of the council. That would be a great shame.
@paul birch
I don’t believe the ridiculously low 209kWh figure. Installations around the world produce around 20-30% of nameplate capacity; very few fall much outside this range; and certainly not as low as 2.3%. So why do people find it so hard to accept that it could be a simple typo?
Why do you find it so hard to accept that it is not correct? More than likely the sustainability officer put the device in a place where there isn’t a lot of wind. Maybe Oldbury just isn’t a windy place.
Still – that was the whole purpose of the experiment. Perhaps they can now get back to what councils are good at…fining people for feeding the ducks or putting out the wrong recycling bin on a Tuesday or any of the other useful things that the bureaucrats like to turn their tiny minds to.
And with wind power being proved to be a complete non-starter they can get rid of their ‘sustainability officer’ as well. Or get him to help working on the bins.
Colin says:
April 27, 2011 at 10:28 pm
“Paul Birch, pretty it up however you like. The fact remains you spent taxpayer money on a useless scheme that has no useful output. It serves only to collect government subsidies and, as noted by others earlier, add to the fuel cost and burn of the fossil fleet. Do try to learn what “hot standby” means. Read Richard Courtney’s post again. You clearly didn’t understand it. Your savings have simply been someone else’s much great expenses.”
I have nothing whatsoever to do with Sandwell council, so I haven’t spent anyone’s money on this or any similar scheme. You seem ideologically bent on refusing to appreciate the statutory constraints under which local authorities operate. They are forced to operate within the current regulatory environment; they can’t refuse fiscal responsibility for their own spending just because you or they disagree with national government or EU policy; their legal obligation is specifically to the people within their borough, not to the general UK public or economy. Arguments over the rights and wrongs of subsidies and the like are thus irrelevant; they can only lawfully decide on the basis of the project’s benefit to them.
“And what do you mean by “close to 100% efficiency”?”
I mean that the work done over total energy removed from the wind flow can be high (say >90%). That is what efficiency means. It has nothing to do with capacity factors, or even to do with the captured fraction of energy passing through unit cross-sectional area at infinity. As I stated, the physical efficiency of a wind turbine says almost nothing about its utility; a highly efficient turbine will not in general be optimal for electricity generation.
“And remember, you spent all this money on a 1 kW machine.”
The council (not me) spent a very small amount of money “to find out how practical it would be to harness wind power on a large scale in the borough”. Any other method of testing the water (which they had a legal and moral obligation to do) would probably have cost them at least as much and probably a lot more. Are you totally incapable of grasping the distinction?
Quis,
Thanks for that explanation. It reminded me of an experience I had when I was in my 20’s. In the 1970’s I owned a house in a rural area [4 miles outside of Scotts Valley, near Santa Cruz] and we relied on a 330-foot deep water well.
Back then I rented 3 rooms to friends to help pay the mortgage. The well water was pumped up to a holding tank above the house. It was an old wooden tank, and the rubber pipe that supplied the well water went in through the top, through some ventilation screens around the rim of the tank. The screens were in pretty bad shape, and were torn open around the place where the hose entered the tank.
One summer a roommate commented on the smell from the water. Her comment prompted us to notice, and every once in a while someone would comment that the smell was especially strong that day. Not that it was overpowering, but when the water came out of the faucet or shower, there was a noticeable odor.
The tank was on a hillside above the house, and no one ever went up there because it was a steep climb, and there were no steps. You just had to scramble up the hillside through the manzanita bushes to get there. But when the smell persisted, I decided to go have a look.
What I found was that thirsty rats had used the rubber hose to climb up into the tank, and had fallen in and drowned. There were about twenty or more decomposing rat carcasses floating in the water. We realized that we had been washing, brushing our teeth, etc., with dead rat water. Ugh! No harm done, though. I’m 63 now, and inoculated against decomposing rats.
There’s a reason that folks congregate in cities. My roommates eventually vacated [for various other reasons], and I sold the house and moved into town shortly after that. And I never worry about city tap water.
Latimer Alder says:
April 28, 2011 at 12:40 am
“Thanks for (perhaps unwittingly) confirming all my thoughts about the many inadequacies of UK local government. Woolly thinking, empire building and profligacy with our money obviously remain as entrenched as ever.”
Then perhaps I should thank you for confirming the inadequacies of the voting public, whose woolly thinking cannot distinguish between large sums and small, or between profligacy and prudence. Anyone with any common sense would appreciate that spending £5000 on generating scientific data to help determine whether to proceed with a project potentially costing a thousand times as much is the very opposite of profligacy.
Kum Dollison: “And, if those old 100 kw turbines at Altamont Pass can still be going strong after 30 Years, I have a hard time seeing how the New ones won’t.”
Now you really are making things up. You clearly have no idea as to how many of them have been abandoned because of mechanical breakdown. The link you posted supports nothing of what you claimed.
“…and we import some Australian Thermal Coal.”
Source please. The US is a net exporter of coal.
Paul Birch: “I mean that the work done over total energy removed from the wind flow can be high (say >90%). ”
You’ve obviously not heard of the Betz Limit, which is 59.3 per cent.
http://www.windpowerengineering.com/news/can-we-overcome-the-betz-limit-in-windpower-extraction/
Reading Paul Birch’s comments scares the help out of me if he’s a councillor spending my taxes.
He can not and will not accept this was a complete and total waste of money and my guess would be if he was in charge he’d happily spend my money the same way again, proper scary, no learn capacity.
Paul I don’t want to spead any dispersions but are you a left learning socialist by any chance? It’s just the flippant way you can spend my money.
Two wind/solar powered warning signs at a dangerous crossroads near Newmarket in Suffolk (UK).
Both broken after a matter of months.
Taxpayers’ money…
Pah..! Don’t talk to me about local government spending our money…
Here in Cambridge (UK) our county council thought it would be a good idea (‘green’, don’t you know) to build a busway (concrete tracks) along an old railway track to the small town of St Ives, thus (in theory at least) getting buses off the overloaded highway known as the A14.
SO FAR, against a budget of £116 million, it has cost £180 million. It is two-and-a-half years late – and hasn’t opened yet.
Best bit – when I e-mailed them to enquire what would be the (negative) impact on bus services into the city via the old approach route, they DIDN’T KNOW, and wouldn’t until the bus companies submitted their traffic plans.
Now, you’d think, wouldn’t you, that before they started, the council would know PRECISELY what routes and frequencies were going to use this new super-highway..?
No heads have rolled, needless to say – press reports of meetings on the project seem to comprise councillors congratulating each other on the management of the scheme…
Local ellections here on 5th May…..
Colin says:
April 28, 2011 at 7:12 am
Paul Birch: “I mean that the work done over total energy removed from the wind flow can be high (say >90%). ”
“You’ve obviously not heard of the Betz Limit, which is 59.3 per cent.”
The Betz Limit is not a limit on efficiency; it is a limit on the fraction of energy flowing through an area that can be captured (under certain assumptions, which do not always apply). One of those assumptions is an efficiency of 100% (no dissipative losses).
Latimer Alder says:
April 28, 2011 at 6:42 am
“Sorry – your continued pleading…”
I’m not pleading. I’m attacking ignorance and unscientific bigotry.
“Let’s remind ourselves of what was trying to be acheived. A very simple task. Find out how much the wind blows over the course of a year in a particular location in Oldbury.”
No, it wasn’t. What was to be achieved was “to find out how practical it would be to harness wind power on a large scale in the borough”. They are very different things. Logging windspeed is only part of that – and even this is a lot more difficult and expensive than you imagine. Ten metre masts aren’t cheap, can’t simply be bought at the local ironmongers, and require specialist installation. Then you have to find a location for the mast, and a safe location for the PC, apply for planning permission, subcontract for the electricity supply, subcontract for the installation of the PC, the logger and the necessary software, and for regular inspection to reboot the PC if it crashes, etc., etc..
“I guarantee it will get planning permission without problems.”
You’d be surprised. If it’s painted the wrong colour you’ll get a storm of protests (we had that problem with a CCTV antenna mast, which was black instead of blue-grey).
“And best of all the benighted ‘sustainability officer’ is being paid for anyway. His time is effectively free.”
Hardly. He will have many other calls on his time, and a lot of the issues will be outside his area of expertise or authority, so he will have to liase with many other officers and departments, such as Highways and Legal, and of course the relevant council committee(s).
“If you bought the useless £5,000 device instead of the £200 useful device none of the above stages would change. It would just be £4,800 cheaper. The expenditure of taxpayers money would be £4,800 less. You would have saved money. Less would have gone out.”
No, the £5000 stated to be the total cost, including installation. Now the catalogue price for an equivalent mast, bought separately, is about £3000 (£2999.98!). The catalogue prices for turbines come in around £1000/kW (in range 400W-2.2kW). It’s hard to see the foundations costing less than £1000 to lay (and probably more). So buying it all as a bundle quite clearly saved money. Your approach would cost more and provide less useful information.
“If in your council, your own sustaianbility officers”
We don’t have any. We have only two employees; the Town Clerk and the Assistant Town Clerk. We manage our own projects (and put in a lot of unpaid work), so we know all too well how these things work and how much things cost.
Shevva says:
April 28, 2011 at 7:15 am
“Reading Paul Birch’s comments scares the help out of me if he’s a councillor spending my taxes.
He can not and will not accept this was a complete and total waste of money and my guess would be if he was in charge he’d happily spend my money the same way again, proper scary, no learn capacity.”
I take it then that you’d prefer they spent £50,000 on a feasibility study instead? Or perhaps went right ahead with a multi-million pound turbine without trying it on a small scale first? Get real.
Latimer Alder says:
April 28, 2011 at 6:48 am
@paul birch
I don’t believe the ridiculously low 209kWh figure. Installations around the world produce around 20-30% of nameplate capacity; very few fall much outside this range; and certainly not as low as 2.3%. So why do people find it so hard to accept that it could be a simple typo?
“Why do you find it so hard to accept that it is not correct?”
Why do you find it so hard to read what I wrote? “Installations around the world produce around 20-30% of nameplate capacity; very few fall much outside this range; and certainly not as low as 2.3%.” There is no way that figure can be correct unless something was very wrong with the school’s turbine (when the experiment would need to be redone using the other turbine instead). It would be very hard to find anywhere with a wind shadow this deep.
We’re a big-time “Net” oil Importer, but we “Export” oil back into Canada every day.
A large coal-fired power plant is being built in Texas, as we type (I forget the name.) It is contracted to use Thermal Coal from Australia.
Paul Birch, no, installations around the world do not routinely produce 20-30 per cent. to cite just one example, the Gaspe projects of Hydro Quebec have never produced better than 19 per cent despite having one of the most favourable wind regimes on the continent.
Your efficiency claims are still rubbish. I explained to you above where the heat losses occur.
Kum, yes, it’s a blend of coal. What you don’t say is how much relative to the total.
“More than likely the sustainability officer put the device in a place where there isn’t a lot of wind. ”
“It would be very hard to find anywhere with a wind shadow this deep.”
The Hawk & Owl Trust in the UK has built a new visitor centre at their Sculthorpe Moor site. It has a 16kW wind turbine to help its “Eco Friendly” credentials. Unfortunately it’s mounted between two rows or trees, at treetop height. When I was visiting on a breezy day it wasn’t even turning, and clearly will never produce anything like its claimed output. As to the sense in installing such a device where they are trying to encourage and breed large birds, words fail me…
http://www.hawkandowl.org/About_us/SupportUs/GoGreen/SwtitchEnergy.htm
@Paul Birch
‘I take it then that you’d prefer they spent £50,000 on a feasibility study instead? Or perhaps went right ahead with a multi-million pound turbine without trying it on a small scale first? Get real.
Nope. What I ‘d prefer is that they stopped b….gg..g about with windmills and sustainability officers and all the flimsy paraphenalia of token greenism entirely and just got on with the jobs they are paid to do….empty the bins, sweep the roads, and cut the grass in the park.
Councils are clearly not staffed or controlled by people bright enough to play with the grown ups…remember how many foolishly invested their taxpayers money in Icelandic banks just before they crashed? It is no business of a local council to be in the electricity generation market, nor to employ people to dabble in it. They can buy their lekkie off the mains like everybody else.
So they can also save £50K a year on employing a guy who (according to you) is incapable even of transcribing numbers correctly in a FOI request. And give the money back to the poor benighted council taxpayers.
Mr Pickles (the Local Government Secretary) has still a long way to go to deflate the vast egos and wasteful habits of local councils. More power to his rather large elbow!
Paul Birch says (April 28, 2011 at 6:12 am): “First, I don’t believe the ridiculously low 209kWh figure.”
Unless you have better information about that specific installation (reference, please), you’re just pulling numbers out of your butt. The sales page Anthony linked claims output of “between 500kWh and 1400kWh of electricity generated per year”, so a perhaps-less-than-optimal site (the school) could easily generate just 209 kWh. The page specifically recommends spending more money on a much better unit for serious electrical generation. In other words, the performance of the test micro turbine is known to be different from that of the “production model”, making the micro turbine no better than a wind logger.
“As I have already pointed out, most of the cost will be in the planning, organisation, construction, installation and operation…the two-phase plan you suggest would not have ‘saved a bundle’. My experience argues that it would probably have cost nearly twice as much.”
So what you’re claiming is that the cost of planning, buying, and installing a £200 wind logger (only) is about the same as planning, buying, and installing a small wind turbine plus connections plus logger, even though the results of the wind logger would have removed the need to plan, buy, and install the turbine? If true, it speaks volumes about the Sandwell Borough Council.
And let’s not forget, folks, that the £5,000 Taylor’s Lane wind turbine wasn’t monitored, and so told the council nothing about wind power potential at its site. The council could have gotten exactly the same result by paying just the £750 to monitor the school turbine for three years (for which they report just 12 months of data in at least 22 months of operation…WUWT?).
Paul Birch says:
April 28, 2011 at 9:45 am (Edit)
Latimer Alder says:
April 28, 2011 at 6:48 am
@paul birch
Why do you find it so hard to read what I wrote?
“Installations around the world produce around 20-30% of nameplate capacity; very few fall much outside this range; and certainly not as low as 2.3%.” There is no way that figure can be correct unless something was very wrong with the school’s turbine (when the experiment would need to be redone using the other turbine instead). It would be very hard to find anywhere with a wind shadow this deep.
The original deadly “smog” (from “Smoke and Fog”) that hung around London for weeks at a time in years past PROVES that regions can – could – and still do have long periods of zero velocity with stagnant air. Winds above 15- 18 knots are needed for power generatin – and worldwide averages are regularly below 20% for so-called “wind generators.” Many days – but certainly not all days – yield power under 1.5% for entire countries.
Since the trading markets in London’s City are the world locus for the CO2 credit Ponzi Scheme, it probably comes as no surprise that wind farms (not to mention tree farms) are sprouting like weeds throughout the UK. Spoilt vistas, navigation hazards at sea – it runs the gamut. Who’d have ever thought that a wind farm would be allowed right at the edge of the world’s densest sea traffic – in the North Sea, just off Kent? Seems they are also sprouting on every fell, and also in the shallower portions of the northern reaches of the Irish Sea. These days we behold shall live in infamy.