Arguments against windfarms/pylons

Akrasia

Sir Arthur Daley wrote: »

Sheep do look out of place in the mountains for sure, whats all that about.

Sheep grazing the mountains are just as 'un-natural' as windmills are. The wolves would have had them for dinner

There is nowhere in ireland that hasn't been sculpted by man down through the millenia

Grayson

gctest50 wrote: »

Great - no-one to complain about the noise

Its good that "we" waited, the new gen ones are way taller and better

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjqhT8RF_dk

To be fair the studies have found that once you get something like a few hundred meters away there's absolutely no negative side effects and you can't even hear them.

I will admit that the one is the video is fecking huge.

SeanW

Arguments against windfarms and pylons?

1. They're mutually inclusive. You have to put the wind turbines in the middle of nowhere, usually on mountain tops. That makes more pylons unavoidable, because you have to carry the power many miles from the dozens of small generating sites in the middle of nowhere, to where the demand is.
2. They're ugly: both the wind turbines and the pylons. Each one (of either) dominates the landscape for miles around. Especially windmills on mountaintops.
3. Large scale wind turbines are a proven threat to birds, and a proven existential threat (barotrauma) to the bat population, rivalling only the White Nose Syndrome fungus as a potential cause of extinction of bats. Basically, the variances in air pressure they cause are sufficient to cause the catastrophic and fatal failure of the lungs of any bat that comes close to one.
4. They produce sod all energy. To produce 1/6th the amount of energy the UK needs from wind turbines, they would need to cover an area the size of Wales with windmills.
5. They're unreliable. They're literally as dependable as the weather. Germany went hell for leather down the road of reliance on weather based renewables. Wholesale prices are all over the place, they have dangerous fluctuations of supply that routinely threaten to crash not only their own grid, but those of their Eastern European neighbours. Or it did, until those neighbours put giant OFF switches on their German border.
6. They cost a fortune. Germany pays twice what we do, as well as 3 times what they pay in France or the U.S. for electricity. Their costs per person, per kwh are comparable to those of Tokelau, Nauru, the Solomon Islands and other small/remote locations. The reason? A large number of renewable subsidy schemes.

Arguments for wind turbines?

1. They're "Green"

Capt'n Midnight

SeanW wrote: »

[*]They produce sod all energy. To produce 1/6th the amount of energy the UK needs from wind turbines, they would need to cover an area the size of Wales with windmills.

And yet we got a quarter of our power from wind last winter.



The London array gets 630MW from 100m2 , and that's with widely spaced turbines. Scale that up to Wales and you'd get (207x630) = 130.410 GW and six times that is 782GW

At the moment the UK demand is 37GW not even 5% of the wind farm you say would be needed. ( Yes there is capacity factor to worry about, but there's also turbine density , location mountains vs. London and taller turbines )


Wales is 1/4 the size of Scotland and there is also England, NI. Then there's offshore wind , UK has quite a lot of that lined up, including large schemes on the Channel Islands. And you can also go up. A 200m high turbine can harvest wind that's beyond the reach of a 100m one.


And there is always the old chestnut about half of Scotland being owned by just 500 people so there's not that many people to get on side if you needed more area in the UK.

Villain

Eirgrid have responded to the 35,000 people who made submissions

Details http://www.oreilly.ie/eirgrid-respond-to-submissions-on-grid-link-project/