A couple of young Island women have set up a much needed pro-wind turbine group - the Island Turbine Action Group (ITAG).
They can be found at: http://www.islandturbines.co.uk/
They have my support. Its time for young people to speak up about their world, their future.
12 comments:
Perhaps they will leave the empty propgandizing alone and tell us exactly what onshore wind turbines can deliver in terms of energy. Or is that too much to hope for, because so far, no one else has. I shall take a look.
Hm. Well they've had a stab at it, to do them credit. What they haven't taken into account is the cost of installing them, and of maintaining them, in relation to energy output, or answered points relating to back-up of energy supply during down-times (ie when there's no wind) plus other objections which can be found on anti-onshore turbine sites.
The nuclear power station argument, dug up by David Pugh, is of course a red herring.
In short, I'm not a lot wiser; all we get is propaganda, some of it informed, some (much of it) not, from one side or the other. Where is the independent scientific analysis which could give us an answer to cost-effectiveness issues?
Since you support them, Geoff, you're bound to know! Enlighten us.
Robert - I wish I had the time to be an expert on everything, but perhaps a proper cost-benefit analysis would be a good idea. Irrespective of that I instinctively feel that we need to try alternative forms of energy production before the lights go out or Dictator Putin decide to block the pipelines to us
This will come as a grievous disappointment to those of us who believed you were a universal expert, but I for one will live with that if we are agreed on the virtues of cost-benefit analyis by independent researchers. A job for the IW College, perhaps, or Southampton University?
or even those of us who thought you were a bloody know-all...
...which, of course, NONE of us did.
Robert - have you ever MET Geoff? Or perhaps you're deaf?
lol
Yes, and... yes. Somewhat. Read nothing into this.
These things are useless - except for making enormous sums in subsidy. I just drove to Germany and passed hundreds. Not one was turning.
Geoff you are a plonker if you think they will save the earth. They wont even 'create' jobs. Once installed the jobs go. You may as well build a couple of hundred council houses, at least people could live in them. Its all nonsense and for the record, I don't mind the look of the things and would happily have on near me. The only pain I would feel when I looked at them would be knowing some greedy b****** was making hundreds of thousands from the taxpayer each year for a handful of barmy turbines.
Well, this is rather what I feel, except that I don't agree Geoff is a plonker: I think he is looking to new ideas to save us from our gas guzzling habits.
What really and genuinely worries me about all this is that the world wide demand for power is going to grow, nothing can stop it. We can't possibly meet that demand without nuclear power, and the so-called greens are just middle-class activists who don't want the rest of the world to enjoy the benefits we've had over the last 50 years or so, because it will mean they have to scale back. We can't run a modern world, in which states previously denied their share of the goods demand progress, water, power, all the things we've had and they haven't, on the basis of renewable energy. The technology doesn't exist to permit it. It would be another thing altogether if it did, but it just doesn't. Onshore wind turbines are an almost indecent irrelevance, green totem poles showing, their advocates hope, that we're "doing something". We are doing damn' all if we rely on renewables, and it is no kind of radical, progressive politics to pretend otherwise.
Some people are trying to call a halt to technological progress on the grounds that if you extend it to the poorer peoples of the world, it will hurt us in the west. Well tough luck, those people just aren't going to stand for it, and we have to grasp the nettle of nuclear power and stop pussy-footing around the issue. I do not question Geoff's sincerity in looking for alternatives to ever more aggressive expansion, and I do believe, as I think he does, that there has to be an alternative to growth at some point. But to turn our backs on nuclear in favour of power generation which will deliver nothing to the rest of the world even if it DID allow us to stand still is cloud-cuckoo land. The situation we're in is far too serious for this sort of muddled thinking. We have to find realistic methods of producing power, and nuclear is the only option we've got. In which case, wind turbines are an appalling irrelevance.
But I'd still like to see a real cost-benefit analysis. I should welcome being proved wrong, but there is just nothing, nothing at all in the data, which suggests that I am. And this is an issue that actually matters, unlike so much of the stuff we talk about on blogs. We can't afford to play with it as though it were just a debating point.
Why does no-one ever talk about the pylons? Surely we'd need huge pylons everywhere to carry any electricity actually generated by these things?
I agree, until we have something better nuclear is our only option. I also agree the debate is our most serious. Wind turbines are a pointless distraction designed to make us feel better and to make a few people seriously rich.
I admire the initiative of these young ladies. However I do wish that they had done their technical research first instead of deciding on their views and then selecting the references to support them. For instance repeating the claim that turbines will return 30x the investment which is just laughable when all the factors are taken into account.
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