ArabiaTerra

Please excuse those of us who are clearly your intellectual inferiors. Forgetting any interest on an unknown amount of required borrowing- CT invests (with no cast iron guarantee of return) 70m in windfarm. Therefore CT bank account ie Shetland reserves is 70m down. At the optimistic 20m a year it will take 3.5 years putting every penny back in the bank to break even. Thereafter and only thereafter will there be a profit into the public purse. No. The £20 million/year is after the loan has already been serviced. I'm offering no opinion on what the CT actually does with the money That 70m is currently invested in the stock market or wherever - every day it is earning return. Bwa-ha-ha-ha. Where on earth do you get the idea that any return on the stock exchange is guaranteed? The CT lost a couple of hundred million in the recent crash. Way more than the investment in the windfarm. Yes, clear as mud. Look, VE have to borrow the bulk of the money from the banks. This means they've got to convince the banks that it is a good investment. Otherwise the banks won't get their money back. That is why you can trust the VE figures. They're not like "sustainable" Shetland who can post any old drivel they like.

And another thing:- If there are some questions you have about the windfarm that you can't find the answer to on the VE website, then e-mail them. They're usually quite quick and happy to respond. http://www.vikingenergy.co.uk/contact.asp

You can find most of the information here: http://www.vikingenergy.co.uk/your-questions-answered.asp It's worth having a look around the VE site as a lot of the questions that get asked on this thread are answered there. And I apologise for the tone of my previous post. I just get annoyed having to answer the same questions over and over again, especially when a little effort on the part of the asker (ie: checking out the VE website) would give them the answers they're looking for.

Good grief, it's not as if we haven't been over this a dozen times already in this thread. 1. The Charitable Trust invests £65-70 million.* 2. It borrows the rest. 3. The windfarm gets built. 4. The windfarm then turns wind into money. Some of which goes to repay the loan and interest and the remainder (estimated to be £20 million/year based on an assumed load factor of 40%*) goes to the CT as profit on it's initial £65-70 million* investment. Clear? "Any loss of earnings on the investment amount" ??! What? What exactly do you think the Charitable Trust did with the initial £60 million or so* it got from the oil industry? It bought stuff. Stuff which generated a return. This is what is known as an "Investment" This is how it turned the quite small initial amount into the hundreds of millions we have been able to enjoy over the last 30 years or so. It is doing exactly the same with the windfarm. Investing. Clear? *Numbers plucked from my imperfect memory as I can't be arsed to look them up again in order to answer the same questions, again.

Except that it was factually wrong. I don't have the paper to hand, but I believe she said the return on the investment would look a lot worse when the costs of servicing the loans needed to build the windfarm were taken into account. In fact, the quoted return figures are for after all such associated expenses have already been covered. Pure profit in other words. So it was prejudiced and wrong.

From here.

Bwa-ha-ha-ha! "Most Scots are conservative" That's the funniest thing I've read on Shetlink for ages. Tell me again, how many MP's do the tories have in Scotland? 1? 2?

Now there's a surprise: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/mar/15/windfarm-sickness-spread-word-australia#.UUMDmjJ-t-8.facebook

go.oot.by.dog, I just want to say that while you might not be getting a lot of feedback on this thread, I for one appreciate your updates on the latest atrocities committed by the evil tory scum and their lib-dem facilitators. Keep it up.

I have used AVG for years though, as others have noted, it can be a bit of a resource hog on older computers. I also use Malwarebytes which catches the non-virusy nasties that AVG misses. I would also recommend CCleaner for more general maintenance. Running it once a week or so clears out a lot of the crap that tends to accumulate.

One of the greats.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2564576758.png

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp89tTDxXuI

Turned out it was my phone throwing a wobbly. Service was still unavailable this morning, but removing the battery and replacing it solved the problem.

Damn it, peat, don't joke about that, you'll give them ideas.

Is Vodaphone off for anyone else, or is it just me? I'm in Lerwick.

And what evidence do you have that the value is inflated?

It's a Yes/No question. Where's the middle ground? And who, exactly, are you calling a reject?

Mine was fine all day yesterday, downloaded 30Gb.

This is the best news I've heard in a while. Perhaps sanity is beginning to prevail: http://www.theage.com.au/business/carbon-economy/time-for-change-china-flags-peak-in-coal-usage-20130206-2dxrv.html

Lobbying your MP in an attempt to persuade him to vote against allowing equal rights for a historically persecuted minority is attempting to force your views on others. That's a logical fallacy: Argumentum ad populum. Just because millions of people hold a view doesn't make that view correct, or worthy of respect. It's not about "being PC", it's about granting equal rights to everyone. Nobody is forcing you to be gay, papastour, but why should you demand the right to discriminate against others? Provided all parties consent to the arrangement, then why not? What gives you the right to dictate how others choose to live their lives? It's none of your business. And I know a Church of England minister who fully supports this move to end discrimination. So what? Good for them, I hope they're happy and wish them all the best in their lives. Why should your religious views give you the lee-way to discriminate against others? If it's that important to you, then find another job. And here we get to the crux of the matter. People do not choose to be gay. Individual sexuality crosses a whole spectrum from 100% straight, through bi-sexual to 100% gay. But wherever on the spectrum you happen to be, it's not something you choose. Why would any sane person choose a sexuality which, in some societies, will lead to either a lifetime of hiding who you are, or a lifetime of self-loathing and persecution with the risk of death or imprisonment if you act on your natural feelings? Yet, in all societies, no matter how repressive there continues to be gay people. Because it is not a choice. And I think the human body/mind/brain/spirit (no such thing) is much more amazing than to shackle itself with the twisted, evil, deranged, antiquated drivel in the Wholly Babble, a collection of middle eastern fairy tales, Jewish tribal history and the drug induced eschatological ramblings of a few desert madmen thousands of years ago. Well at least we can agree on something. It's not his intelligence that's being questioned here. It's his empathy, compassion and respect for human dignity. All things that you Xtians are supposed to excel at. Except your racist, bigoted, homophobic holy book short-circuits your natural human decency and requires you to hate anyone and anything which dares to be different. This is the first and so far, only, decent thing this government and Prime Minister have done while in power, and I salute them for it. It doesn't stop me opposing every other thing they've done while in power, but kudos to them for this. "Great" Britain? Seriously? Now you've got me laughing. This country hasn't been great since 1945. It is nice, though, to see us moving a little bit closer to Civilised. Who cares, it's none of our business. That's the whole point. It's a start. Newsflash: We're already there!

Maybe half a dozen clearly marked disabled spaces and some actual enforcement by the police would solve the problem then without wiping out the whole motor-mile?

Here's the thing, Peenk... Nobody has ever suggested that wind power is going to be the sole source of renewable energy in the future. It will be combined with solar, tidal, hydro, wave, nuclear, and some measure of power storage. Also big improvements need to be made in reducing demand such as better insulation, more efficient appliances etc. At the moment, however, wind is the source which is most commercially viable, so it makes sense to build wind first. This is what we're doing. Solar is also rapidly approaching commercial viability and is being installed in increasingly large volumes. Another piece of the jigsaw is the Europe wide supergrid which is proposed. This would give us access to export markets all over Europe when our windmills are running at overcapacity, and to storage systems like the Norwegian pumped-storage and French nuclear when the wind isn't blowing. While we may have to build much more nameplate capacity than required to make wind work on a UK scale, once the supergrid is up and running, we will have a market to soak up the output of this overcapacity when the wind is blowing, and access to storage and nuclear baseload when the wind isn't blowing. There's also a proposal to build an interconnector to Iceland to bring their geo-thermal into the mix and other proposals to cross the Med and build huge solar stations in the Sahara. More info on the supergrid can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid As long as the external costs of burning fossil fuels (eg: Climate Change) are left out of the economic cost of extracting and using them, they will always be cheaper than non-fossil fuel energy sources. But this is irrelevant. The debate is not about the cheapest method of energy generation, it is about saving the planet. The only point at which economics comes into the debate is the argument about which is the cheapest way to save the planet. Because fossil fuels are the source of the problem, they are off the table before you even start.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2490892654.png Wow! Though Shetlink has been a bit very excruciatingly, painfully, frustratingly slow recently.

Nope: This is just the usual paranoid conspiracy thinking the bigots always respond with when they discover their neanderthal views are not in fact shared by the rest of the population.