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Shetland windfarm - Viking Energy


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Oh, but it can.....

 

Never heard of a compulsory purchase order? If your house is in a site "needed" for development, it can be taken from you, without your consent and with the market value paid to you. It is never a good outcome for the home owners. Believe me!

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There is a bit more to it than that. More scare merchants. There will be negotiations first, normally, you would then take advice.

It can take a while, but consent is given, plans are being finalised. The best option would be to go on your terms if it came to that.

 

Tell that to the people who lost their homes due to the Eurostar/Eurotunnel link. You don't "go on your terms" but on THEIR terms for a lot less than the property was worth before the project ever came about.

 

And apologies, yep, I should have said compulsory purchase as opposed to repossession but in essence, one could say it is a form of repossession - it's possessed from you by others.

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A rather biased article there, unlinked. It's common knowledge that some parts of the tory party are opposed to onshore wind. So what if one of them says he wants subsidies cut? That doesn't mean they will be. It is a coalition and the lib-dems are opposed to this. It also assumes the con-dems will still be in power then, which I really doubt.

 

Also, the whole point of subsidies in the first place was to level the playing field with fossil fuel energy. As fossil fuel prices rise, the plan always was to reduce the subsidies. When on-shore wind reaches grid parity, the subsidies will not be necessary. The recent furore about solar subsidies was because the cost of solar dropped faster than expected so the uptake of these systems was higher than expected which used up the money set aside for these subsidies much faster than expected. The government decided to cut the subsidies much more than expected and basically buggered up the entire industry. The industry took the gov to court and the gov's actions were declared illegal. I would expect the same result if they tried the same with the wind industry.

 

The recent rises in electrical bills have been entirely due to the volatility of the fossil fuel market, principally gas prices. The rise due to windfarm subsidies, in comparison, has been little more than a rounding error.

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^ Fair points, AT - but it is getting extremely difficult to find any articles that aren't biased these days, IMHO.

 

Whilst I can see where you are coming from, you could apply the same argument to the Scottish political situation - who is to say that AS will be in power and that the Scottish Government's stance will be the same in a few years' time? Who knows what the EU's stance will be on subsidies in a few years' time? Laws change. Politicians change and, dare I mention it, Trustees of a certain charitable trust change. :wink:

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The recent rises in electrical bills have been entirely due to the volatility of the fossil fuel market, principally gas prices.

 

This is something that I do not understand.

 

As far as I am aware the wellhead price for natural gas has been falling for the past five years or thereabout, and currently is about the same as it was at the turn of the century. However the price paid by both industry and consumers seems to have been steadily increasing over the same period. Do you know why that should be?

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The Tunnel.

 

I had a great time working on that project, plenty of money. Now, how long ago, how big was the project? Relevance?

 

Mine wasn't so 'great', so much so that after a few assignments I refused to return, despite the agency begging me to go back and the client asking for me by name. Granted, the pub opposite was handy enough for lunches, as was Euston Station and the British Library. However, SP, I'm sure we can agree that the nature of our respective roles differed somewhat.

 

The relevance is that if a project is deemed in the interest of the nation, compulsory purchase orders do (and will) occur - that's the relevance, hence my stance re at what cost. Define cost.

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Peat posted :-

Where did I say thousands of 145m turbines? I said huge. Twister!

 

So would you care to define what you call huge then Peat ?

I posted a simple statement that the larger turbines would be more difficult to erect, I have never said it would be impossible. You then embarked on a mission of posting totally irrelevant drivel about the hight of the turbines above sea level and totally avoided my question of where all these " thousands " of " huge " turbines were than had been erected in windy conditions similar to Shetland. You are not a politician by any chance are you ? ( it seems your 33 in Lewis have not been built yet, let me know when they are up and running )

The point I was making was that there would be a lot of down time during the erection because of the high winds, something any contractor will be well aware when putting forward their bids and because of the location and risks may well decline any interest !

You keep bleating on about this scare mongering, as far as the turbines go I think the erection of them will be a fairly impressive piece of engineering. The problem as I see it, is the turbines are in the wrong place and the people living in the area were never asked .

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The recent rises in electrical bills have been entirely due to the volatility of the fossil fuel market, principally gas prices.

 

This is something that I do not understand.

 

As far as I am aware the wellhead price for natural gas has been falling for the past five years or thereabout, and currently is about the same as it was at the turn of the century. However the price paid by both industry and consumers seems to have been steadily increasing over the same period. Do you know why that should be?

 

Demand.

 

With the massive increase in demand from (mostly) China and India, there has been a corresponding increase in price. The wellhead price is irrelevant. (I believe the wellhead price for Saudi crude is around $5/barrel, try buying oil for that price!)

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The recent rises in electrical bills have been entirely due to the volatility of the fossil fuel market, principally gas prices.

 

This is something that I do not understand.

 

As far as I am aware the wellhead price for natural gas has been falling for the past five years or thereabout, and currently is about the same as it was at the turn of the century. However the price paid by both industry and consumers seems to have been steadily increasing over the same period. Do you know why that should be?

 

Demand.

 

With the massive increase in demand from (mostly) China and India, there has been a corresponding increase in price. The wellhead price is irrelevant. (I believe the wellhead price for Saudi crude is around $5/barrel, try buying oil for that price!)

 

But surely increased demand should also drive the price at the wellhead up also. No?

 

My understanding is that the wellhead price (in the States at least and I presume worldwide but have not actually checked) has been in decline for the past few years. Is the gas market really so distorted, or controlled by cartels and middle men perhaps, that the price out of the ground can fall in spite of growing demand?

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It depends what you mean by wellhead price. I assumed you meant cost of production. There has been a load of new shale gas production come on-line in the US in the last couple of years, but this has gone towards replacing coal fired power generation rather than onto the open market.

 

The thing is, the demand has also been rising and this has kept the price up. I'm not that familiar with how the international gas market works, but I think the gas price was pegged to the oil price, or at least, used to be. That could be having something to do with it.

 

Also, there's the fact that the power companies are quick enough to raise prices when the wholesale price goes up, but they can be a bit tardy in reducing it when the price falls. I remember the government slagging them off about that a couple of years ago.

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I posted a simple statement that the larger turbines would be more difficult to erect, I have never said it would be impossible.The problem as I see it, is the turbines are in the wrong place and the people living in the area were never asked .

 

Apologies for the misunderstanding. A little excitable.

 

Don't know about folk not being asked or even not informed, there seems to have been quite a consultation period.

 

http://www.vikingenergy.co.uk/downloads/The-Consultation-Process.pdf

 

What does stand out is the fact that all the councillors, including parish or community, had an opportunity to do something about it. You could ask how many councillors in total took up the offer, from S.I.C. level, MPs to community to visit other Scottish communities.

720 people went to public meetings, well there were 720 attendances, some may have gone to more than one, which is not many out of about !5,000 adults or there abouts going on 2009 figures.

 

And there is this

 

PostPosted: Thu Feb 16, 2006 8:10 pm Post subject: Shetland's proposed windfarm - Viking Energy

 

Of course there may be a few that may be directly affected, many more indirectly but maybe, if it pays off, all of you may be affected.

 

It would appear that the campaign to stop the turbines was not successful, the councillors who stood again were elected.

 

Best get the most from it now.

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If the Viking Energy project has moved far beyond counting the number of advocates then why have the WSG been trying to get local businesses to sign a letter of support for a futher £6.3 million CT investment in the windfarm?

 

...Lets do some counting.

 

How many businesses signed the letter? 140.

 

How many businesses are listed in the commercial section of the Shetland directory? 1600.

(that being 160 pages with approximatedly 10 entries on each page on the Shetland Times website).

 

So statistically that means that only 8.75% of local businesses signed the petition.

Or 91.25% either did not sign or do not support further investment.

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