Shetland windfarm - Viking Energy

[ArabiaTerra]

Well no, I did not say that. The alternative to a wind farm on Shetland is by no means automatically coal fired power stations on the mainland. Wind, wave, solar, hydro and tidal are of course the ones I would like to see but nuclear is an option as I guess is clean oil, coal or gas. Prisoners on a treadmill if you prefer.

No, this is precisely my point. The coal fired stations are the worst polluters. They are the ones which have to be closed first and it is these that the windfarm is aimed at replacing. Only when the last coal fired station is a crumbling, rusting wreck, will you be able to compare the windfarm with other renewables, nuclear and gas fired generators.

[JustMe]

ArabiaTerra wrote

No, this is precisely my point. The coal fired stations are the worst polluters. They are the ones which have to be closed first and it is these that the windfarm is aimed at replacing. Only when the last coal fired station is a crumbling, rusting wreck, will you be able to compare the windfarm with other renewables, nuclear and gas fired generators.

Well I am not going to argue about coal fired power stations but I am still not convinced that the Shetland windfarm is the best answer. Need to see evidence that a Shetland windfarm really beats one in, for example, Fife.

[ArabiaTerra]

^^^^ Just do the math. The VE farm is rated at 650MW, which with a latency of 55% will give an average output of 300MW (ish). The same power output from a farm in Fife (average latency 30%) will require a 1GW farm. Which will cost approximately twice as much and use twice as much land (given the same type of turbines). Now the cost of the cable will bring the costs up to roughly level, which is not an argument for not building the Fife windfarm or the Shetland windfarm, but rather an argument to build both. And this still leaves the 350 spare MW in the cable to fill with tidal and wave power in Shetland.

 

We need to be building both in Shetland and Fife if we are to get enough capacity to replace coal.

[PJ of Hildisvik]

Last time i looked it was a 540mw windfarm

[Para Handy]

So in 10 years time. Will some outfit from outside the UK be paid to clean the blades of all this windmills. Or will all who make money from the profit at the councils expense ,get of the backsides and clean them, there selves and earn the money by doing some work.

[crofter]

the gas is going to come in at sullom so why not pay for there turbine to be expanded and if for some reason we needed backup power then we could use gas which is a lot cleaner than oil.

but maybe we don't want any change and were fine with millions dying.

 

Excellent idea. How much gas has been flared since sullom opened? Millions more are going to die whether the windfarm is built or not.

[crofter]

 

 

The carbon cost of building the windfarm will be less than building the same capacity of coal fired station as the prime mover (the wind) costs nothing compared to the prime mover on a coal fired station (boiler + steam engine). Then you have the running costs. Each megawatt of wind power costs nothing (carbonwise) while every megawatt from a coal fired station costs 3 tonnes of CO2 (approximately) for every tonne of coal burned.

 

 

What is the carbon cost of providing the interconnector?

 

How much CO2 per MW from a gas fired generator?

[MuckleJoannie]

So in 10 years time. Will some outfit from outside the UK be paid to clean the blades of all this windmills. Or will all who make money from the profit at the councils expense ,get of the backsides and clean them, there selves and earn the money by doing some work.

 

From the Shetland Times story

 

Mr Ward... added however that the work is an example of the type of employment that islanders could benefit from should the Viking Energy project go ahead.

 

He said: “We’re spending tens of thousands of pounds on something that could be done locally. Shetland must play its part in providing energy beyond the oil and gas era and that will mean large projects. Large projects will mean local jobs. The work we’ve commissioned is the kind of skilled engineering that would make a good career for someone sitting in a Shetland classroom right now.â€

 

 

If the wind farm were built I would imagine that this would be a job like painting the Forth Rail Bridge, once they had worked their way through the lot it would be time to start again.

[wilks]

Great idea, local jobs for local people.

But is there any guarantee that the maintenance and repair jobs would go to a Shetland company.

Would it not be a case that it would have to go out to tender and we'd end up with a Spanish company, or similar, doing the work.

Just look at the carry on with the North Boats after that went to an "outside" company.

[ArabiaTerra]

So in 10 years time. Will some outfit from outside the UK be paid to clean the blades of all this windmills. Or will all who make money from the profit at the councils expense ,get of the backsides and clean them, there selves and earn the money by doing some work.

 

From the Shetland Times story

 

Mr Ward... added however that the work is an example of the type of employment that islanders could benefit from should the Viking Energy project go ahead.

 

He said: “We’re spending tens of thousands of pounds on something that could be done locally. Shetland must play its part in providing energy beyond the oil and gas era and that will mean large projects. Large projects will mean local jobs. The work we’ve commissioned is the kind of skilled engineering that would make a good career for someone sitting in a Shetland classroom right now.â€

 

 

If the wind farm were built I would imagine that this would be a job like painting the Forth Rail Bridge, once they had worked their way through the lot it would be time to start again.

And what the hell is the problem with such a job? As long as it is paid well enough to support a family for a working life, then what's the problem? It seems to me that by reviving a bunch of jobs like minding the canal, or working the railway we could provide jobs for people that are not up with the modern world and have no wish to be, while at the same time improving the energy efficiency of our transport system by using all of it ....

 

Do I need to go on?

 

There are tonnes of ways we could change the way we do things. Stuff that needs human judgement, but which has been replaced by machines, because it's cheaper, educate the humans, give them managerial responsibility, not in a management bullsh*t sort of way, but in the way that means equal wage for equal hours and they will be better than the machines every time. Society needs to change.

 

We need to eat the rich, quite literally.

 

Edit: Above post posted by AT, while he was really, really pissed.

[sheepshagger]

^not much differs from posts made while really really sober

[sheepshagger]

pray tell how i insulate a 150 year old croft house. no cavities very little loft space.

 

It has been done many times before PB strap the walls,put polystyrene in the gaps, plasterboard over that, tape and fill then paper or paint as you wish.

Simple really.

 

but first stick a dart in your wall you may find that it has already been strapped and plasterboarded, all you need to do then is pump in the insullation.

 

Call Shetland Heatwise they will advise you of the best way forward for free.

[sheepshagger]

Just do the math. The VE farm is rated at 650MW, which with a latency of 55% will give an average output of 300MW (ish). The same power output from a farm in Fife (average latency 30%) will require a 1GW farm. Which will cost approximately twice as much and use twice as much land (given the same type of turbines).

 

Your maths just don't add up AT

 

our 650MW wind farm will cost 65% in materials used in the turbines of a 1GW wind farm down the road in lets say Fife. Then we have the cost of the cable to add to our costs the wind farm in Fife does not. Then I'm sure you could find land in Fife a lot more suitable for such a large construction project thus lowering the comparitive costs for a wind farm in Fife compared to one here. Then we have power lost in transmission lowering the output of a Shetland based windfarm by a considerable amount.

So really on the whole when you take all the variables into account and not just the ones that support your argument then you will find it will be cheaper to build a wind farm in Fife that delivers comparable amounts of electricity to the end user than one up here.

But then SSE havent got some mugs in Fife to hand over a load of dosh to them but guess what they found up here.

[nortower]

did anyone see waterboy last night on e4

 

 

so FUNNY!!!!

[ArabiaTerra]

Then we have power lost in transmission lowering the output of a Shetland based windfarm by a considerable amount.

OK, so my figures are (very) approximate.

 

But I do want to pick you up on one thing. The transmission losses are negligible. I'm not going to go through the whole thread right now, but someone (one of the mods, I think) posted the losses on modern HVDC cables a while back. It would be less than 1% for the distance involved.

DESERTED-UK[/url]"]... average transmission losses over modern high-voltage DC transmission lines (HVDC) are about 3% per 1000 km