Another reason ...

Perhaps it depends on the distance from them, or maybe the design of the blades. Either way, noisy or not, they are still a blot on the landscape, and IMHO, a huge waste of resources for the relatively small amount of power that they generate. And actually, who's to say that by 'stealing' the wind, they don't cause some 'butterfly effect' elsewhere ? :-) Little of what man does actually has a zero effect on his environment ...

On what Dave says about the distant sound of aircraft etc, it's strange how that noise is missed when it's not there. When I was a kid, my mother had ticking clocks all over the house. You never noticed them when they were running, but if one had stopped, you could hear that it had, as soon as you walked through the front door.

Likewise, did you notice it when the volcano grounded all the air traffic ? It was preternaturally quiet outside ( I live in the countryside, so it's quite quiet anyway). Even the birds and other animals seemed unnaturally quiet, so presumably, they could hear that there was nothing to hear as well, and they didn't like it. When we had that earthquake a couple of years back in the early hours, I was sitting here at the computer, and some minutes before it rumbled through under the house, the cows in the field behind the house, as well as owls and foxes, went bananas, so I guess they must have been able to sense it coming.

Arfa

I've been to wind farms myself. The only noise is sort of a muted 'whoosh-whoosh', and that with a standard 3 blade unit. There are spiracle types made to make even less noise.

I think people that don't want alternative energy are equating windmills with giant fans, which make much more noise because they are moving air, and not air moving them.. BIG difference!

Have you seen any of the videos of them failing in high winds and exploding?

I don't think that there are many people who are sane, that are against 'alternative' energy, per se. The trick is that the word needs to be combined with that other little word "practical". That seems to get forgotten in all this. PV panels are all very well, if you've got a country below say 45 deg N, with a lot of unused desert available. Even then, you have the logistics and losses involved in shifting the power that you generate, to anywhere that it's needed. In the UK, and most of Europe, there just isn't enough year round sun of any intensity, to make the projects feasible, which is why other countries in the EU have tried it, and rejected it. But of course, the dumb old UK have got to give it a go themselves, rather than learn from others' mistakes ...

Likewise, what use are thousands of windmills that don't generate for at least 50% of the time, due to the winds being either too low in speed or, staggeringly, too high ! I haven't looked much into the practicalities of the tidal windmills that are now being installed, but it strikes me that the maintenance costs of these are likely to be rather high, and the lifetime in corrosive salt water, comparatively short.

We already have an 'alternative' power technology that is both clean and practical, and that is nuclear. I really don't know why people have such a problem with it. The French don't. When we are all sitting shivering in our houses because some eastern bloc altercation has cut off our gas supplies, and waiting for the sun to shine and the wind to blow, the French will be chortling away, offering to sell us even more of their nuclear power than they do now, at even more inflated prices. I appreciate that there are potential issues with recycling waste nuclear material, but I am sure that these are not insurmountable.

And don't make the mistake of thinking that 'alternative power' is all about responsible people trying to save the planet. It's not. Whilst such scientists and eco-minded people may have been at the centre of the original concepts, it is now all about big business. Selling the public these technologies by way of the hysterical global warming issue (trends now indicate a cooling again BTW, much the same as we were being told back in the 70s) and pseudo science that has little if any foundation in fact, is making huge amounts of money for companies who are having their products built by the biggest industrial polluters in the world, and don't actually give a toss about green issues ...

Arfa

Well, wind power was one of the earliest forms of energy man used for moving things - sailing ships, windmills, etc. Well before steam was harnessed.

Perhaps solar power saps the sun's rays too? ;-)

The tax situation also matters. I have a friend who lives near Philadelphia, who put an array up on his single family house. He is nowhere near a desert.

His nominal income tax rate is around 33%. He bought a $30,000 dollar array and was able to take it off of his income tax, so that reduced the price to $20k.

He was able to get another $10k off in state tax credits and grants.

Because of the "cap and trade" law, his power company is paying him for the right to claim that his array provides power to "the grid" as if they were doing it, which nets him $2,500 a year. They also pay him per killowat hour he does put onto the grid.

It's not 100% free electricty as it has no storage capability, so it becomes cloudy, or during the night, he has to buy electrcity. For saftey reasons, it shuts down if the main electricity goes out.

The array has a long term warranty and is insured as part of his homeowner's policy. So basicly, he has invested $10k for a $30k array, and after 4 years, anything he gets from it in cap and trade fees, reduced electrical bills, and additional value on his house is free.

Around 2000, a co-worker who lived in the UK (same company, different offices), was looking at using special heating cells designed to heat GPS satellites from "earthshine". His estimate that for 3000 UKP total investment, he would save 450 UKP a year in gas.

I'm not sure where he lived, it was withing motorcycle commuting distance of "The City".

I lost touch in 2002, I wonder if it worked? I expect that UK heating gas bills have gone up in 10 years.

Geoff.

Brenda Ann Inscribed thus:

Yes I agree. It annoys me that that the objectors try to use noise pollution from wind farms as a method of garnering support. I won't deny that the visual aspect is intrusive.

We have a group locally, only four or five people that want to ban wind farms. They are using the arguments above as a method of trying to bully the local residents into agreeing with them. The laughable thing is the wind farm in question is going to be built more than ten miles from the village. In addition its a fairly wooded area, so people aren't going to be able to see them anyway !

Arfa Daily Inscribed thus:

Hi Arfa,

Ahh, but we are supposed to be the technological leaders... aren't we !

Yes maintenance costs bother me too. I wonder how long it will be before we start scrapping systems because of those costs.

I agree the French have embraced the Nuclear nettle and have taken huge steps to protect the plants from attack by terrorists and the like. I've seen first hand the twenty foot, triple razor wire, barrier fences and the deep ditches between them. All the cameras and IR lighting used to monitor the area. Not small areas either ! The one that I visited was a 20Km drive just to get around it. They are not very visible either, having lots of trees and such planted around reduces its visual impact. Unlike a UK power station, you could drive right past a French one and not even know it was there.

Hasn't the Uk government just got into bed with EDF on the basis that the French will share there Nuclear technologies, or they hope they will. Either way EDF will maximise the extraction of profits from the UK populace to pay for it !

Agreed ! The feudal system is alive and well... The serfs will pay !

power

Do you have evidence for that, one way or the other?

The same thought has crossed my mind, too. But they're unlikely to have a significant effect, for roughly the same reason that humans are unable to deliberately modify the weather -- it takes too much energy.

Nuclear reactors don't bother me, much. Nuclear waste does. Do you know what a pebble bed reactor is? It appears to have the potentional to end all the problems with nuclear energy, but nobody's doing much about it.

That was so last decade. Now with the "austerity programme" (did I spell that correctly?), 20% VAT, and multiculturism, you will be just trying not to get blown up nor starve, to keep the lights on and not freeze this winter. :-(

You might as well get out those old books on how to make do with food rations. I don't have them, but read a set someone lent me of reprints from the Imperial War Museum.

The only problem with them, is that around 1943, supplies of powdered milk and eggs, and canned pork (SPAM) started to arrive from the US and Canada. I don't think there will be much to spare this time around. People on food mailing lists from the US are complaining about the high prices of food, and the lack of the usual holiday (it's Thanksgiving in the US soon) sales. :-(

Geoff.

country

This is not a problem -- not in the US, anyway. We have a big connected grid.

People keep saying that solar energy doesn't work at night. Correct. But we need less energy at nigh. The idea is to have a mix of energy sources.

You talk about "practical", but what is the "practical" way to get rid of the waste?

It isn't just what's left over from the fuel rods. It's also the stuff that the radiation contaminaes.

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is

I thought you had more sense. Where do you get this business about "cooling trends"?

Regardless, global warming ultimately has nothing to do with it. We need safe, renewable sources of energy. We can't keep burning fossil fuels indefinitely. THAT problem should be driving us to develop them as quickly as possible. We should have been working on it aggressively after WW II. But, no. "The Market" will automatically solve all our problems.

It appears that work on extracting oil from algae (which appear to be the source of natural oil deposits) has been going on for more than 30 years, mostly at oil companies. Why do you think we haven't seen any progress?

There are some things that are too important to be left to the people who profit from them.

country

Philadelphia,

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it. :-)

There is a potential ;-) problem in Germany with so many uncontrolled small scale PV rooftops if there is a very sunny day coinciding with minimal grid load.

I wonder if it will be in my lifetime there will be the pan-Europe grid (probably very high voltage DC strangely) connecting Iceland geothermal / Norway hydro/ French nuclear / N Africa solar together

Prime example in the UK.

Thatcher close the coal mines to punish the miners. Only possible because we had just got North Sea gas on stream. Now, some 20 years later it is getting exhausted and we have to import gas at vast cost.

Wouldn't it be nice to find a politician who can see beyond the next election? And actually have the good of the majority in mind?

There's another, broader issue here that hardly anyone pays attention to... overpopulation.

When I was a kid, the world's population reached 2Gcbl, and people were afraid of starvation, disease, etc. It's now 6Gcbl, and still growing, partly due to the "green revolution".

You don't need to be Malthus to understand that the Earth doesn't have infinite carrying capacity. If things don't change, at some point the system /has/ to collapse.

Somewhere between now and then we will see drastic changes, with governments controlling the size of the homes we build (probably outlawing single-family dwellings), how many children we can have, how many calories a day we can consume, and so forth. (See "Soylent Green". I haven't read Harry Harrison's "Make Room, Make Room", but the idea of recycling human protein is /not/ in it.)

You get violently angry when I insist that government force people to do what's right about trivial things -- such as how you light their homes. Wait until you see what happens to your /basic/, "inalienable" rights when there isn't enough land to produce food or house people. And you think Communist societies are bad...

There are simply too many people. Imagine what things would be like if there were only 500Mcbl. (By the way, I'm in favor of across-the-board population reduction. The people in developed countries consume too much of everything, and there are simply too many people in poor countries.)

The problem of overpopulation is largely due to developed countries spreading death control, without forcing the people who receive it to practice birth control. (And I'm not talking about abortion.) If the potential recipients of death control say "Our religion (or social beliefs, etc) prohibits birth control," they will hear "Our understanding of biology prohibits helping people who don't understand what happens when you disrupt the natural order of things." Which is what death control is -- a disruption of the natural order, in which disease and lack of food keep populations from growing rapidly.

If you don't understand this, think of human beings as deer, and disease, lack of clean water, malnutrition, etc, as wolves. What happens when you start systematically killing off the wolves?

Unfortunately, both Liberals and Conservatives pass laws based on what they believe is morally or philosophically correct, without /any/ regard for the consequences.

There might be unintended consequences, but hardly any of them are unpredictable.

If only that were true. At least it would be honest.

Absolutely. There were plenty of predictions about the amount of gas in 'our' part of the North Sea and indeed there is actually more. But it has been squandered producing 'cheap' electricity. When that can be made from other means. But other means ain't so good as gas for heating and industry.

I'm sure it does Dave, I'm sure it does ... :-)

Arfa

Look it up. It's about 33% efficent, i.e. 1/3 of the electricity put into the grid comes out. Still with solar and other passive power that's mostly an up-front cost, you just need to replace fossil fuel buring plants with an equivalent output passive system.

Geoff.

Well, you could try having a read of this one. I know it's a 'popular press' article and there will of course be people who immediately scream that the press are all liars, but I think that the basic figures quoted, and some of the reasons that that are stated for the evangelical take up of this technology, are probably thereabouts on the money, as I have read similar ones elsewhere

Arfa