By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
I shall not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.
Thus William Blake, in the coda of the mystical poem that the nation belts out at full if not always tuneful volume on the Last Night of the Proms at the Albert Hall every summer.
England’s g. and p. l. is not what it was when Blake wrote about it. The place is being expensively carpeted with ugly, medieval, lo-tech wind farms.
The governing class still likes windmills. It is making a fortune out of them, at everyone else’s expense.
The Left support windmills because the developers quietly give their parties – “Labor”, the “Liberal” “Democrats”, and the “Greens”, in order of Leftness – huge kickbacks from the massive State subsidies they get.
The center-Left “Conservatives” like them because, like “Dave” Cameron’s pa-in-law, the wind farms are profitably built on their vast estates.
The unspeakable “Tim” Yeo, “Conservative” chairman of the Commons Environment Committee, who came off very much second-best in a tussle with Professor Dick Lindzen at a recent hearing, makes around $150,000 a year (in addition to his fat Parliamentary salary and allowances of $1 million a year) from various soi-disant “renewable” energy boondoggles subsidized by taxpayers.
Yeo’s committee has acted disgracefully, suppressing or sneering at any testimony (such as that from Professor Lindzen) that threatens’ its members’ personal fortunes and the immense donations to their parties from people whom their insane climate policies have made into multi-millionaires.
Johnny Taxpayer, who pays £30 billion a year for the mad climate policies that represent the biggest transfer of power and wealth in human history from the little guy to the fat cat, is heartily sick of wind farms.
Half of all zoning consents applied for by greedy developers supported by members of parliament whose parties hope to profiteer from wind farms are now being turned down, even though the government desperately wants local authorities to grant them because the Brussels junta, whom we do not elect, requires us to generate a fifth of our electricity from “renewables” by 2020.
The proposal that bids fair to bring the entire tottering house of cards crashing down is just about to be submitted for zoning consent.
Britain’s most important coastline – the Jurassic world-heritage coast in Dorset – is about to be ruined irretrievably by the Navitus Bay Wind Array, 194 wind turbines almost 600 feet high, covering six square miles, less than 9 miles out to sea.
The swept area of each turbine is 200,000 square feet. Yet the mean output of 4000 acres of vast 5 MW wind turbines, even at the absurdly optimistic 35% capacity factor claimed by the developers, will be just 339.5 MW. A single modern 4 GW coal-fired power station produces ten times as much output.
Figure 2a. The Navitus array, seen from Durlston Head lighthouse on the Jurassic Coast, will span almost 45 degrees of arc (nearly the entire field of view here).
Figure 3. The sheer size of the proposed Navitus Bay Wind Array wind farm is disproportionate to and intrusive upon the fragile and important landscape of the area. The illustration, kindly supplied by the Poole and Christchurch Bays Association, shows the scale of a 5 MW and a 7 MW turbine set against the Needles Light, one of Britain’s most-loved landmarks (they will not, of course, be this close to the coast). The array of 194 turbines each 581 feet high and sweeping an area of 200,000 square feet will be within 11 miles of the Needles. The UK Government’s minimum offshore distance for wind farms is 12 miles. The wind farms will tower over the neighboring cliffs.
The pathetic 339.5 MW output of this monstrous boondoggle is less than 0.8% of the 43.2 GW mean total UK load. Electricity accounts for 33% of UK CO2 emissions, which, at 142.6 MtC (522 Mt CO2) in 2008, represented 1.72% of global CO2 emissions.
Therefore, Navitus Bay will abate 0.0045% of global CO2 emissions. The annual subsidy for 339.5 MW over 8766 hours, at 1.8 times the Renewable Obligation Certificate price of $82.80 (£46), will be $444 million, or $2.22 bn over five years. The subsidy regime is too uncertain for reliable costing thereafter.
The subsidy is part-paid-for by a Climate Change Levy of about $0.09 kWh–1 on non-exempt consumers of electricity, and a Carbon Price Floor. These two levies brought in about £700 million ($1.2 bn) in 2013. The 2.975 TWh projected to be generated annually by Navitus Bay is equivalent to 7.235% of the 41.132 TWh generated from the renewables subsidized by the levies.
Accordingly, some $87 million of the annual cost of the levies would be attributable to the Navitus Bay project and, as a market distortion intended to favor renewables at the expense of fossil-fueled generation, is properly treated as additional to the subsidy, so that the five-year gross cost of the project is $22.65 billion, and that is before taking account of the cost of interconnection to the national power grid.
Armed with this information, we can determine whether Navitus Bay will make a useful contribution to cutting global CO2 emissions.
Navitus Bay is to come onstream by 2021. We shall study the first five years of the project, from 2021-2025. Beyond that period, the subsidy regime is uncertain.
CO2 concentration, on business as usual, will increase by 11 pmv from from 412 to 423 ppmv over the five years. Of this 11 ppmv, the 0.0045% abated by Navitus Bay represents 0.0005 ppmv.
The global CO2 forcing abated by Navitus Bay over the period, using the CO2 forcing equation, is 5.25 ln(423/422.9995), or 0.000006 W m–2.
The fraction of global warming abated is 0.000006 W m–2 multiplied by the five-year Planck sensitivity parameter 0.323 K W–1 m2, or 0.000002 Cº. That is approximately 2 millionths of a degree.
The unit mitigation cost, which is the cost of mitigating 1 Cº of global warming by measures of equivalent unit cost worldwide, is the five-year subsidy of £2.65 bn divided by the 0.000002 Cº global warming abated by Navitus Bay over the five-year period, or a mere $1.3 quadrillion.
The global total mitigation cost, which is the cost of mitigating the 0.08 Cº global warming that IPCC (2013) projects will occur over the five year period of study, is 0.08 Cº mutiplied by the unit mitigation cost of £1.3 quadrillion. That gives $109 trillion, which is $15,560 per head of global population or, as a percentage of projected global GDP of $436 trillion, 25%.
The benefit-cost ratio, assuming that adapting to 1 Cº unmitigated global warming over the 21st century would cost 1% of GDP, broadly consistent with Stern (2006) and IPCC (2013) on the assumption that little warming occurs, is 25.
It is 25 times costlier to address global warming with mitigation projects such as Navitus Bay than to allow the projected global warming to occur and meet the costs and damages of adapting to its consequences.
The “Greens” in the Bournemouth area, which will have its tourism industry wrecked by the medieval mechanical triffids visible in the bay less than 12 miles away, are of course backing this environment-destroying project because they, too, benefit from generous handouts from “renewable”-energy corporations.
Never mind the national finances. Never mind the taxpayers’ finances. Never mind the immense environmental damage the wind array will cause. Never mind the world heritage status of the Jurassic coast. Never mind the birds that will be killed. The Greens will profit, and – communists though they be – they are now the most rapacious capitalists on the planet, when it comes to their own bank balances.
Their argument in favor of this nonsensical scheme, which will be visible from the three major centers of Poole, Bournemouth, and Christchurch, as well as from the Needles, one of Britain’s best-loved landmarks and a haven for sailors, and from Durlston Head on the Jurassic Coast itself, is that almost 1.3 million tons of CO2 a year will not be emitted thanks to the turbines.
The calculations we did earlier, showing that it would be 25 times costlier to make global warming go away with offshore wind farms than to let the warming happen and adapt to it, were done on so generous a basis that we assumed it was true.
But it wasn’t true. The problem is that the wind, even offshore, is so fickle that the array will only generate electricity a third of the time. So just as much fossil-fueled capacity as before has to be kept onstream and spinning in case the wind drops. But instead of spinning at full and efficient capacity, it is kept spinning in a fashion so inefficient that there is no CO2 saving from the average wind farm at all.
On this true basis, it is infinitely costlier to make global warming go away with wind farms than to let it happen, because wind farms actually add to CO2 emissions when all is said and done.
The developers’ claims, parroted by the Greens, about the amount of CO2 emissions that the wind farm will “save” are entirely without foundation, as are their claims that the wind farm will help to meet the UK’s CO2 emissions targets laid down by our unelected masters in Brussels. The array, like all wind farms, will actually increase our CO2 emissions.
But it’s going to create jobs, right? The developers’ website proudly says there will be – wait for it – 140 permanent jobs keeping the turbines running. At a project subsidy of $0.53 bn a year, that works out at getting on for $4 million per job, per year.
The developers also claim the project will increase the UK’s “energy security”. Er, no, it won’t. There will be many tons of extremely scarce and expensive neodymium in each windmill, and that comes almost entirely from China, at enormous environmental cost in the shape of acid pollution of the water table for thousands of square miles via the process to leach the neodymium out from the ore. Not that you’ll hear much from the Greens about that. Wonder why not.
And how is the Royal Navy, with more admirals than rubber ducks, going to defend these and other offshore wind farms against sabotage? Security? Schmecurity.
Finally, the developers claim – and this is heroically insane – that the project will “stabilize electricity prices for the future”. Try telling that to the average energy user, who is paying at least twice what he was paying for electricity just a few years ago. A substantial fraction of the increase is attributable to subsidies for wind farms.
You would be forgiven for thinking that this proposal, like the regime of subsidy that has attracted it, is bonkers. So it is – and that is how it is going to be stopped.
Zoning consents for large projects like Navitus Bay have been taken out of the hands of local authorities. Too many of them, elected by the voters who might have to live next to these monstrous arrays, were saying No when Ministers and civil servants could only profiteer if they said Yes.
So Ministers now decide the bigger proposals themselves – or, at least, a vast bureaucracy decides on Ministers’ behalf. However, it is a Ministerial decision, and it is accordingly subject to judicial review in the Administrative Court in London.
The law is clear. If a decision is irrational, it is unlawful. Ministers are given very wide discretion, but, if a Minister takes a decision which, coldly dissected by a court, makes no sense whatsoever because no reasonable or sane Minister could possibly have taken it, the court is obliged to set that decision aside.
Watch this space. Navitus Bay could well prove to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Show Fig. 1 to a court and it will start to question very carefully everything said by the developers, the Greens, and the government. And, as with the case against Al Gore’s movie in 2007, once the court starts to ask questions there is nowhere for the Forces of Darkness to hide.
Some 50 residents’ associations have already banded together to fight this poisonous scheme. Let us hope they fight it all the way, and let us hope they win. Otherwise, we shall all be singing a new version of Jerusalem:
… till Socialism’s builded here
In England’s Green, unpleasant land.
Figure 6. Views of the Jurassic World Heritage Coast, as it is for now. Enjoy it while you can.
Figure 7. The last Great Bustard in the Spanish province of Cadiz, killed by a wind farm.
Lord Monckton could you start a petition on the Direct Gov website stating that as windfarms become defunct they must be returned to their original state by the builders and landowners.at their cost.You would know best how to word it.
See the applications drop after that lol.
Help please !
I used Lord Monktons numbers to attempt to work out how long global warming or co2 increase would be delayed on a business as usual basis.
Using the figures for global temperature reduction projected to the year 2100 and assuming a temperature rise of 2 degrees C by the year 2100, I concluded that the Navitus Bay wind turbine array would delay global warming by 22 minutes.
Using the figurs for co2 I concluded that the Navitus Bay farce wold delay the increase in global co2 by 39 hours.
So it looks like I got my mathematics wrong in at least one and more probaby both cases. But if I am in the ball park with either number, then the whole Navitus boondoggle is a sickening and pointless farce.
Perhaps Lorrd Monkton would be gracious enough to assist ?
Or someone else might like to have a crack at the number crunching.
Also when calculating co2 / energy saved by using turbines we should not forget the costs involved in mining, processing, manufacturing, transporting, erecting and maintaining our modern equivalent of the Easter Island statues which I read somewhere was as much co2 / energy as the monstrosities purportedly save. So the net effect of the above primary stage costs combined with the secondary stage costs of backup energy generation is that far from saving co2 / energy, wind turbines innstead actually increase co2 by the same amount as they are meant to save. And finally there are the third stage costs of dismantling etc.
Our politicians have failed to exercise due diligence in assessing the whole life energy and co2 costs of these monstrosities along with failing to make a proper assesment of the impact on jobs and industrial competitiveness.
http://publiclawforeveryone.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/the-super-wednesbury-principle-is-alive-and-well-r-rotherham-mbc-v-secretary-of-state-for-business-innovation-skills-2014-ewhc-232-admin/
See the links also. I don’t think a judge is going to overrule this one.
@Village Idiot
> Now we wouldn’t want to see the Market distorted by subsidies would we?
“The OECD estimates that the UK fossil fuel industry received £4.3 billion of support from government tax breaks and assistance toward infrastructure development in 2011.”
Right, but have you seen the taxes on fuel at the pump? The governments suck in MANY more billions then what they hand out here.
I sincerely doubt there going to be some big “downstream” tax on some high priced wind electricity which is already over priced in the first place and the RESULT of tax money!
Of course the government gives “some development” taxes and breaks to oil and fossil based industry since that is ONE OF THEIR LARGEST sources of taxes! And such projects tend to create a lot of high paying jobs also.
Wind farms generate no such wealth or tax revenues for the governments. However such wind farms certainly fills the pockets of those receiving subsidies from the government. So fossil fuel not only supplies the “energy” for rail transportation, food growing, heating of schools and hospitals and not to mention the ability to power good jobs in the industrial sector.
So yes there is some tax breaks and subsides that go to carbon based sources of energy. However the benefits of using such fuels far outweighs those subsides and the government then turns around and receives BILLIONS of taxes on those fuels.
The oil based industries are among the most heavily taxed and provide the largest sources of taxed products to the governments.
So if you think people here see some kind of hypocrisy that the carbon based fuel industry receives some subsides from the government it is LAUGHABLE that you FAIL to point out the huge positive net taxes that such fuels provide to the government. They are MASSIVE amounts.
Wind farms are the result of taxes – the oil industry is not and carbon based sources of energy are a major source of tax revenue for most governments. In fact the carbon tax and trading is an attempt to further tax people on the energy that they use which has ALREADY been taxed!!
This whole CAGW scam has been and is about taxing you. Governments knew that if you tossed in carbon trading carrot to the financial sector then they would support governments to “get in” on the trillions of dollars bonanza that would result in forced carbon trading. The end result was governments and the financial sectors sucking more money out of you’re already beaten up and overtaxed wallet.
The tax breaks and incentives to carbon based energy does not distort the market and at worst such moneys results in a HUGE cash cow of tax revenues for the government – something wind farms do not.
As an American who has traveled extensively in England, I am dismayed at the prospect of some of the world’s most beautiful landscapes being defaced by wind turbines. I am not familiar with the Dorset coast, but I do know well the Hole of Horcum, Fylingdales Moor and Robin Hood’s Bay in Yorkshire. I know well the Salisbury Plain and Old Sarum. I know well the Isle of Ely, and the magnificent cathedral there, and the magnificent cathedral at Lincoln, as seen from the famous viewpoint in the Castle. I know well the Slaughters and the Wallops. How dare these swine desecrate these places with their feckless contraptions.
These monstrosities must everywhere be uprooted and removed at the expense of the criminals responsible for foisting them upon the world.
Michel, who seems determined to discourage judicial review (which in any event does not arise until all other remedies are exhausted), cites the Rotherham case, but without saying what conceivable relevance it could have to the Navitus case. The two self-evident grounds on which judicial review might lie are 1) the British Government’s failure to adhere to the Aarhus Convention, which mandates public as well as parliamentary consultation on the underlying policy principles (a consultation which did not take place before the principles were set in stone), and 2) failure to comply with the Government’s own declared policy principles – a failure that is so abject and so obvious, when properly quantified, that it is not merely unreasonable but irrational. The question of proportionality, in issue in the MBC case, is not central to the Navitus case.
The opponents of the Navitus project, who are delighted that the head posting has appeared, are determined to ensure that every possible step is taken to oppose the project. The will oppose it in the Administrative Court if they have to, but they will give the developers and the government a fair chance to put matters to rights before they do.
@ur momisugly Lord Monckton, who states in the post above:
“The problem is that the wind, even offshore, is so fickle that the array will only generate electricity a third of the time. So just as much fossil-fueled capacity as before has to be kept onstream and spinning in case the wind drops. But instead of spinning at full and efficient capacity, it is kept spinning in a fashion so inefficient that there is no CO2 saving from the average wind farm at all.”
The first sentence is true. Wind does blow intermittently, and windturbines produce power only when the wind blows. From there, however, the Lord is on thin ice. Or, perhaps, no ice at all.
There is, indeed, CO2 savings from wind farms, but I do not ask the Lord to take my word for it, as good as that word is coming from an experienced, degreed engineer. Instead, the Lord can look to his own countrymen from Imperial College London, in their 8 October, 2012 paper, linked below.
The title is “Supplementary evidence to the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee on the economics of wind energy”. In the paper, the position taken by Professor Gordon Hughes is soundly refuted.
The quick summary is:
One can, indeed, increase CO2 emissions from operating a power grid that has wind energy as part of the mix, if one were to eliminate base-load power and replace that with open-cycle gas turbines, OCGT, to quickly respond as the wind changes. However, (my words, not the authors’), no one is that stupid. At least, one hopes that power planners and grid operators are not that stupid. Wind turbines would be far more economically backed up by load-following gas-fired plants, which do in fact produce less CO2 emissions as their loads are reduced. In fact, that is exactly what experience in the US has shown: wind turbines are causing load-following gas-fired plants to reduce output, and energy-hogging OCGT are not used except in their traditional role as peak power for very high grid load conditions.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmenergy/writev/517/m57a.pdf
I have yet to meet,or read anything which would tell me any of the members of UKIP were as bad as the present Pollies that the UK have.The polls say that Labour is the likely to win the next election.
Why would anyone vote for them?
Ed the Red got you into this mess in the first place.
Roger Sowell:
re your post at April 29, 2014 at 5:16 pm .
The several studies from real-world data reported in this thread show that subsidy farms do NOT reduce CO2 emissions from power generation in the UK. Indeed, the government is now commissioning additional thermal CO2-producing power stations which are needed to enable the subsidy farms to operate.
A self-serving paper from an academic institution does not alter the fact that subsidy farms provide neglible CO2 reduction.
Richard
Ooops! Not neglible but negligible. Sorry. Richard.
Roger Sowell:
Following my answer to your specific assertion, I now write to summarise the issues.
Windfarms only exist to farm subsidies:
they are expensive, polluting, environmentally damaging bird-swatters,
they increase emissions from power generation,
they increase costs of power generation
they only provide electricity when the wind is strong enough but not too strong,
and they provide no electricity of use to a grid supply system at any time,
but they increase deterioration of conventional power stations supplying the grid.
Richard
Dear Lord Monckton
Thank you for this excellent essay, ….. but you have made an unfortunate but important error!
The Navitus Wind farm will not be spread over six square miles but sixty square miles.
Other considerations include the fact that radar will not work properly in a wind farm, with the risks to shipping should there be a problem, and will also apparently cause what is called a Radar Void over the Southerly approach to Bournemouth Airport, requiring any aircraft approaching from that direction to have an active transponder fitted, which most small aircraft do not have.
The Condor ferry on one of its regular trips to the Channel Islands, maybe with 500 people on board, maybe on fire after colliding with one of these massive structures in poor visibility, might not be able to be located by radar, rescue helicopters can’t operate obviously, so this is a major risk. We have to remember that the Canberra cruise liner drifted right through the area of the wind farm some years ago and was only stopped close to shore. Several hundred oil tankers use the main shipping channel a few miles South, and it would only take one, with a steering or engine problem, now able to drift through an empty unobstructed area, striking a turbine foundation, to cause a Torrey Canyon disaster for the whole of the Dorset Coast.
I have been amazed at the cavalier way in which Navitus have misrepresented the whole project. Their visuals which not only were completely unrealistic, referring to very much smaller turbines than those intended now to be used, and from which they did some Public surveys, still using those results; their refusal to mail drop the local population to inform us that this was planned, as they originally promised, so that the project has become a great shock at the last minute for most people. They originally tried to fool us with childish videos including that of a yacht approaching some large telegraph poles. They put these on their website and Youtube. When I placed a comment on Youtube that these were completely misleading, they removed all the videos! That is their way of doing business. Try to fool us, and withdraw only when found out.
I have spoken to the Advertising Standards Authority and they said that should sufficient information be available they would look at it with regard to possible misrepresentation in order to obtain funds from the Public purse, so maybe someone like yourself would be the right person to pursue that option.The funds in question being estimated to be in the region of £7-9 Billion from taxes and green utility bill additions to pay vast subsidies to EDF a majority French Govt owned utility. Ironically they were taken to court in the last few months in France, and the French Govt supported the decision to refuse to place a much smaller wind farm adjacent to Mount St Michel, a UNESCO Heritage Coastal site just like our only UK awarded UNESCO Heritage Coastal site at the closest point to Navitus, as it was decided that it was not a suitable place for a wind farm and would damage tourism. However they are happy to destroy our economy and tourism and local beauty.
Navitus, in the depths of one of their documents state that there will be a reduction in visitors to the area of 32% should the wind farm go ahead. Bournemouth, which depends on tourism, was awarded the Gold Medal by the Tourism Industry in Novemeber 2013 for the best resort in the UK. Bournemouth alone gets 6 million visitors a year, a reduction of 1.8 million a year would destroy the local economy.
Following months of fruitless and contradictory correspondence, I had to resort to the Freedom of Information Act to try to get information from the Crown Estates who stand to gain £millions in fees if this crazy project goes ahead, concerning the reasons why this area was chosen, and try to see any surveys etc. It is impossible to find out. I was inundated with mountains of irrelevant and contradictory information.
Thank you for your help in this matter your support is much appreciated
I was in the south of France talking to a guy who captained a Gin palace. Next to his boat was one up for sale that had not been used for over a year. The Captain told me that he hoped the new buyer was properly informed on the state of the boat as even moored up the ongoing maintenance costs were incredible and he didn’t think the boat had been touched in that time.
So these wind turbines must take a hell of a beating out at sea. How often do they need servicing.
“Till we have built Jerusalem, In England’s green and pleasant land.”
What is “Jerusalem”, and why should we want to build it here?
“Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,”
Is Jerusalem to be built by killing people?
To FJB,
Obtaining money by deception is fraud. This is not a matter for the Advertising Standards Authority, but for the Serious Fraud Office.
Village Idiot is using the usual leftie trick of trying to make a subsidy sound like some form of giveaway when in fact it is a reduction in the amount of tax snatched in the first place. Would VI consider the UK tax free income allowance a subsidy? It’s the same thing since the government kindly allows you to keep more of your own money. This trick has been used by the Marxist Greens to try to claim that taxpayers fund oil companies as much as they do windmill owners but it is a lie.
@ur momisugly richardscourtney who says:
“The several studies from real-world data reported in this thread show that subsidy farms do NOT reduce CO2 emissions from power generation in the UK. Indeed, the government is now commissioning additional thermal CO2-producing power stations which are needed to enable the subsidy farms to operate.
A self-serving paper from an academic institution does not alter the fact that subsidy farms provide neglible CO2 reduction.”
If UK is truly doing as you allege, then you all deserve pity. If your grid planners and operators are truly that stupid, then there is not much I can do. Stupid is as stupid does.
I can point out, though, that Drs. Gross, Heptonstall, Green and Staffell pointed out a much better way. Your sneering put-down of them because they are academics tells us volumes about you.
I would also point out one of many real-world examples of wind energy NOT increasing electric power prices, and that is our US state of Iowa. Funny thing, that!
I shall respond a bit later to your several false statements in a different comment. As usual, you have no clue about wind energy and its operation nor its effects on a grid.
Here’s a clue for those who design and run a grid: “Don’t Get Stuck on Stupid”.
What amazes me ( but I guess ought not anymore give the univeral nature of selfish nimbyism) is the tendency for huge outcry against anything which might have an impact in the “outcryer’s” own back yard but the steadfast ingoring of the impact of our lifestyle on the rest of the world.
Lets apply some simple tests …So :
You prefer Coal over windfarms … OK so how would you react if there was a propsal to mine coal in your village?
You prefer Gas over Coal ..How would you react to fracking undeneath in your village.
You prefer Nuclear …. A power station is proposed 10 miles downwind of your home….
You get the idea …….
If we want to use energy then we must all surely accept that this needs to be produced somewhere and that we cannot simply push it out of sight to be made “over there” in someone else’s backyard.
There are probably no easy and universally popular solutions …So lets open our minds and start realising that we may all have to take a little inconvenience in order to maintain our lifestyles.
Government subsidies and financial incentives are nothing new and without them we might never have solved such basic problems as Longitude, However in that case it only took the loss of 4 ships and 1500 sailors lives to get some action and I am sure some saw it as a total waste of money to invest in the new technology.
Can we really stand by and consistently object to renewable energy, no matter how currently inefficeient, simply because we don’t want it in our back yard and would rather import gas from Russia , Oil from Saudi Arabia or use Electricity from European owned Nuclear power stations.
Long term maybe we can harness Solar farms in the Sahara but even then there will be objectors ….
Time to grow up …..
Trevor,
Your point is well taken but it is all a question of scale.
The new Hinkley Point C nuclear power station will cover an area of about half a square kilometer and generate a continuous output of 3GW electrical power.
To generate an average output of 3GW from intermittent wind energy would require wind turbines covering an area of nearly 2000 square kilometers. That is a larger area than the whole of Surrey.
Furthermore the cost of installing such a large number of turbines is larger than building a nuclear plant. This is mainly because a wind turbine only lasts a maximum of 20 years before it need to be replaced, whereas the lifetime of a nuclear plant is 60 years. The operational costs are about the same.
So one new nuclear plant at say Dungeness could replace all of Navitus, the London Array, and the East coast off-shore wind farms. It would also remove fossil fuel stations whereas wind farms cannot replace a single fossil fuel plant, because regularly there is no wind across the whole UK. Yesterday for example, the total output from all 5000 UK wind turbines was just 100MW (0.1GW) !
Flydlbee says:
April 29, 2014 at 3:14 am
The seabed belongs to the Crown Estates, from which the Queen draws a proportion of the profits as her income, so be aware of whom you are up against.
Beyond the 12 mile limit the seabed does not belong to the Crown Estates. In addition the proceeds from the Crown Estates go to the Treasury not the monarch.
What amazes me ( but I guess ought not anymore give the univeral nature of selfish nimbyism) is the tendency for huge outcry against anything which might have an impact in the “outcryer’s” own back yard but the steadfast ingoring of the impact of our lifestyle on the rest of the world.
Lets apply some simple tests …So :
You prefer Coal over windfarms … OK so how would you react if there was a propsal to mine coal in your village?
You prefer Gas over Coal ..How would you react to fracking underneath your village.
You prefer Nuclear …. A power station is proposed 10 miles downwind of your home….
You get the idea …….
If we want to use energy then we must all surely accept that this needs to be produced somewhere and that we cannot simply push it out of sight to be made “over there” in someone else’s backyard.
There are probably no easy and universally popular solutions …So lets open our minds and start realising that we may all have to take a little inconvenience in order to maintain our lifestyles.
Government subsidies and financial incentives are nothing new and without them we might never have solved such basic problems as Longitude. However in that case it only took the loss of 4 ships and 1500 sailors lives to get some action and I am sure some at the time saw it as a total waste of Governement money to invest in the new technology.
Can we really stand by and consistently object to renewable energy, no matter how currently inefficeient, simply because we don’t want it in our back yard and would rather import gas from Russia , Oil from Saudi Arabia or use Electricity from European owned Nuclear power stations.
Time to grow up and accept our actions have consequences which have to learn to live with …..
Opportunities foregone that may be considered in the economic viability of implementing the Navitus Bay Wind Array project:
a) is the maintenance of the array an order of magnitude or more higher than other power generating solutions? Seem that it is likely and this is a major cost and a major cause of additional CO2 creation (in performing the maintenance) that should be emphasized by the group opposing the project.
b) is the avoidance cost ( the cost for other business activities to stay out of the exclusion zone around the array) calculated into the cost of the array and as well as the extra CO2 used to avoid the array? This is likely to be a major argument of local groups of businesses using the area around the array.
c) is the security apparatus (helicopters, boats and intensive underwater surveillance devices) and security manpower for the array an order of magnitude or more higher than other power generating solutions? That is likely a major cost of the array as well as additional CO2 generated, it should be emphasized.
c) is the loss of tourism business in the local community calculable in order of magnitude terms? It should be pursued as an argument for compensation, such compensation to local business needs to be included in the cost of the array.
d) is the loss / degradation of cultural heritage (Jurassic Coast) calculated as a cost of the array? It is perhaps the most important point, n’est ce pas? It is a strong position that the cost to the world of the heritage lost/ degraded is invaluably too high to accept. This is the ‘build your array some other damn place’ argument.
e) is the rescue effort for unavoidable injured wildlife calculated as a cost of the array? This line of though argues that you can’t just let injured wildlife just die there without rescuing it and medical aid to bring it back to health. This cost economically can be combined with the moral message, This is a strongly populist line of thought.
Enough for now, but there should be some more ‘opportunities foregone’ points that the opponents of the array can consider.
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: I do not endorse broader intellectual implications of the things I just wrote, This is just operational tactics, not in any way is it intellectual support of any kind of ‘anti-technology’ or ‘anti-progress’ ideology.
John
John Whitman says:
April 30, 2014 at 7:38 am
Somebody needs to get hold of the Safety Case(s). And the In Service Maintenance & Repair Schedule(s). Thats apart from anything to do with Installation documentation. Then of course there is the Disposal Case – sooner the better or not installed at all really.
Trevor says: @ur momisugly April 30, 2014 at 7:11 am
Lets apply some simple tests …So :
You prefer Coal over windfarms … OK so how would you react if there was a propsal to mine coal in your village?
You prefer Gas over Coal ..How would you react to fracking undeneath in your village.
You prefer Nuclear …. A power station is proposed 10 miles downwind of your home….
You get the idea …….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Lets see:
OK so how would you react if there was a propsal to mine coal in your village? – With happiness because it provides several friends with jobs. Actually there is a mine site about 4 miles away from me.
You prefer Gas over Coal ..How would you react to fracking undeneath in your village. – With absolute GLEE! I am talking to a long time friend who is willing to vet proposals to do fracking ON MY FARM. I have 2 wells providing my water by the way and enough geology courses to realize the anti-fracking hysteria is a real crock. The first patent in USA for fracking was awarded to Civil War veteran Col. Edward A.L. Roberts. Roberts was awarded U.S. Patent (No. 59,936) in November 1866.
You prefer Nuclear …. A power station is proposed 10 miles downwind of your home…. When I stand up and look out the window I see a nuclear power plant. Cross country it is less then 10 miles away. By road about 14 miles. My husband is a physicist and a good friend is a Nuclear physicist (PhD) who ran experiments at the Nevada test. I know several people with nuclear power expertise. Again knowledge trumps fear.
I am not a hypocrite like the late Ed Kennedy nor are most people at this website. So go peddle your insults elsewhere.
Roger Sowell:
It is physically impossible for the subsidy farms to produce economically competitive power to that from fossil fuels or nuclear power.
This is because all energy is free (it was all created at the Big Bang) but collecting and concentrating energy to enable it to do useful work is costly. Fortunately, nature has concentrated solar energy collected over geological ages by photosynthesis, and has stored it in dried compressed forms called fossil fuels. So, when the steam engine enabled use of the high energy density in fossil fuels to provide power, then wind power, solar power and muscles (of slaves and animals) were displaced because they have such low energy densities that they cannot compete.
But in your completely misleading post at April 30, 2014 at 7:04 am you write
Costs consist of prices AND SUBSIDIES.
People have to pay the total cost and not only the prices. Funny thing, that!
Richard