Shetland windfarm - Viking Energy

[Skunnered]

Yep, same basic argument as the general election. Perhaps we'll end up with a coalition wind farm?

[Ichorus]

Aabody still moaning? How about you have a wee paddle across the waters to the mainland and walk down to Whitelee. See them up close and on similar scale. Then make an informed decision.

 

 

 

 

Has anyone else noticed that it is mainly the generation that has forced us to invent our way out of this mess called climate change that has the biggest problem with the wind farm?

 

You are swell folks.

 

Apologises will be accepted via comment on here.

[sjeunson]

The Windfarm Supporters Group website is now live. You can find it here:

 

http://www.windfarmsupporters.org/index.html

 

Seems to be well written and well researched. Haven't got the whole way through yet though.

[Para Handy]

We wont have any choice in the mater. The Scottish Parliament will over rule and build it anyway, if the people of Shetland vote no. After all it wont be in their back yard. Just on a little tinpot oil dump in the North Sea

[sjeunson]

Are there anymore meetings planned planned in the near future? Something where both groups are represented to put across facts and reasoned opinions which educate the people of Shetland about what's happening intead of scaremongering? It's an absolute joke how little some people actually understand or are willing to understand about what they're arguing for or against.

[Guest Anonymous]

http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/187749

 

An interesting article and comments

 

but of course it will be dismissed as right wing big oil propaganda by the wind farm supporters

[ArabiaTerra]

http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/187749

 

An interesting article and comments

 

but of course it will be dismissed as right wing big oil propaganda by the wind farm supporters

Well the guy's not wrong. The UK's power infrastructure is knackered and does need replacing. Where I would take issue with what he's saying is in his assessment of the potential of renewables, especially wind power.

 

The crucial thing about windpower is where it's built. If you put your wind turbines in central and southern England, where most of the population are, then the power factor of the turbines will be low, 15-25% I believe. So to get the most out of windpower you have to put the turbines where the wind is, which is around the coast, offshore and in places like Shetland. In these places you get a power factor closer to 30-40% and 55% for Shetland (which is, I believe close to the power factor of a typical gas plant).

 

The big difference, of course, between gas and wind is that you can turn the gas plant on and off as you need it, where with wind, you have to take the power when the wind blows. This is just an engineering problem though. The solution is to store the power for use when needed, and there are many different ways of doing this such as hydro pumped storage, batteries, hydrogen, hot water, molten salt etc, basically any way you can think of to store heat which can be later used to drive generating equipment when the power is needed.

 

The guy in the article: "a former Grid Control Engineer who has a lifetime’s experience in electricity supply throughout Britain" is an expert in running the old type of grid, the fossil fuel based grid. We can't do things that way any more, the carbon cost is too high. The UK's entire power infrastructure needs to be rebuilt to suit renewables, it needs to be integrated with a Europe wide grid so we can import power from Saharan solar plants during the day and export our wind, wave and tidal power during the night.

 

Of course, doing this is going to cost billions, but as the article says, our current infrastructure is knackered and needs to be replaced anyway, which will cost billions anyway, so why not use as much renewables as possible? Once they are built, the power they produce is effectively free.

 

Building new coal and gas plants means spending billions to build the plants, then spending billions more over their lifetime to fuel them. And with the volatility of fossil fuel prices, especially gas, and the limits to supply of these finite resources, we have no idea what the eventual total cost will be of more "traditional" power. With renewables, the up-front cost may be higher, but there is no further fuel cost for the lifetime of the generators.

 

Disregarding, for the moment, the environmental costs of continuing to burn carbon, the economic case alone, for renewables, is compelling. Add in the environmental costs of continuing to dig stuff up and burn it, and the case becomes unchallengeable.

[Carlos]

"All power to the wind – it cuts your electricity bills"

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727704.900-all-power-to-the-wind--it-cuts-your-electricity-bills.html?full=true

[tivacudda]

AT, Do you know what power factor is?

 

The power factor of an AC electric power system is defined as the ratio of the real power flowing to the load to the apparent power,[1][2] and is a dimensionless number between 0 and 1 (frequently expressed as a percentage, e.g. 0.5 pf = 50% pf). Real power is the capacity of the circuit for performing work in a particular time. Apparent power is the product of the current and voltage of the circuit. Due to energy stored in the load and returned to the source, or due to a non-linear load that distorts the wave shape of the current drawn from the source, the apparent power will be greater than the real power.

[ArabiaTerra]

^^^^ Yes, I know what the technical definition of power factor is. Unfortunately, the term is also used to describe the effective output of windfarms. Another term I perhaps should have used instead, is latency.

 

I apologise for any confusion caused.

[Grafter]

A good article about the reality of too much reliance on windpower as advocated by the Lib-Dems. http://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/Article.aspx/1852188

[Carlos]

The sad thing with that one is, as seems more usual nowadays, that the readers comments have more real content than the article

[Gorgonzola Butt-cheese]

Your right there carlos, will gordon has made a very good comment.

[Carlos]

The "how many conventional power stations will it replace" argument?

 

AT has had a go at that one, and the link I post a little while ago has some new (to me) angles on how wind farms affect the wider electricity costs, but yes, ideally there would be an article by somebody with the background to take all those issues and look at the various shades of grey involved and not try to boil everything down to a single headline.

[JustMe]

Quite by chance I recently saw some windfarms and although I am still convinced that renewable energy including but not limited to windfarms is a good idea I am now convinced that situating them in industrial areas and on brownfield sites is far better than ruining the view of our wild places. So I guess in Shetland terms that means places like Gremista.