A warning about Renewable Energy

Deleted User wrote: »

http://www.turn180.ie/?p=636

http://www.turn180.ie/?p=651

Who is advising our Government ?

Probally CRH the amount of concrete that is going into windmills is massive each one is the equivlent to a mini housing estate

This book is worth a read if you want the numbers behind the various sources of energy. Its very good and very transparent and objective.

Whiskeyjack wrote: »

You'll have to forgive me for questioning the validity and objectivity of your source material given the banner above it says "Humans are not causing global warming", which flies in the face of evidence that's been mounting for decades, not least of which the research into the cause of hurricane Sandy.

Turn180 aren't for turning, I suspect.

cordially,
Scofflaw

murphaph wrote: »

Hmmm, think that horse has long since bolted with the Bungalow Blitz of the 70's and the McMansion fever of the naughties tbh. We've already destroyed most of our pristine views already.

What would you call a pristine view?

murphaph wrote: »

Hmmm, think that horse has long since bolted with the Bungalow Blitz of the 70's and the McMansion fever of the naughties tbh. We've already destroyed most of our pristine views already.

Just like the view that was "destroyed" by the 4 turbine windfarm in Indreabhan that would ruin the "visual amenity" of the area - a windfarm that can only be seen from a certain narrow corridor on the road!

There's an awful lot of hot air being talked about "visual amenitiy" - almost exclusively by non-locals who want their holiday area to remain quaint and rustic and to hell with what the people that actually live there think or want!

antoobrien wrote: »

Just like the view that was "destroyed" by the 4 turbine windfarm in Indreabhan that would ruin the "visual amenity" of the area - a windfarm that can only be seen from a certain narrow corridor on the road!

There's an awful lot of hot air being talked about "visual amenitiy" - almost exclusively by non-locals who want their holiday area to remain quaint and rustic and to hell with what the people that actually live there think or want!

The holiday home and hill walker brigades deserve to have the countryside protected for their pleasure after all they are the ones paying taxes which subsidize the rural dwellers taxes to maintain rural infrastructure.

antoobrien wrote: »

Just like the view that was "destroyed" by the 4 turbine windfarm in Indreabhan that would ruin the "visual amenity" of the area - a windfarm that can only be seen from a certain narrow corridor on the road!

There's an awful lot of hot air being talked about "visual amenitiy" - almost exclusively by non-locals who want their holiday area to remain quaint and rustic and to hell with what the people that actually live there think or want!

Almost exclusively by non-locals worried about their holiday area? To hell with wht the people there think or want? So wind farms don't attract NIMBYs then? That would be news to some of the good people around Ballydehob Co. Cork.

Nothing wrong with wind farms.
One-off housing, ribbon development and deforestation are an actual problem and eye sores.

murphaph wrote: »

Hard to say, but I don't see any major difference between carpeting the countryside in one off houses and carpeting it in windmills.

(increases unsustainability)

VS


(decreases unsustainability)

Icepick wrote: »

image removed

I think you misunderstand. From a visual amenity perspective I have nothing against windmills and I think many that do have probably already built themselves their own private eyesore in a field somewhere.

I'm not convinced by wind power without storage however. We can build all the wind farms we want, but we need to be able to store the energy or it's largely pointless.

I think transport will be able to use wind in the form of more efficient battery storage for electric vehicles, but that's not enough.

sharper wrote: »

Of course it's not pointless, it just means that without storage you need some other form of energy to supplement it when the wind isn't strong enough.

The current situation is that we burn fossil fuels for energy even when the wind is blowing strong, now that's pointless.

The reality is that other than gas there is no fossil fuel that can be turned on and off fast or that you can control the output of so that if wind is blowing at half speed you can supplement. The reality is that what is happening in Ireland at present is that we are producing electricity from wind that has no purpose as we have little or no control of it. On top of that we are paying the producers top dollor for it even if it is produce at 3am in the morning and we have no use for it so it is increasing our energy costs with little economic benifit.

Wind is not choosey when it blows so we have to make sure that we can cover the peak demand periods from 8am to 10am, and from5pm to 7pm. Unless we put in a storage system and at present there is only one option wheather it is feasible or not is the 20 billion euro question

bbsrs wrote: »

The holiday home and hill walker brigades deserve to have the countryside protected for their pleasure after all they are the ones paying taxes which subsidize the rural dwellers taxes to maintain rural infrastructure.

So the needs of the few outsiders, who pollute the environment to get there and build eyesores for their holiday homes (e.g. Michael McDowell's holiday home in Roscommon, which wouldn't look out of place on Embassy Row) outweigh the needs of the locals.

The bit about the infrastructure is as laughable as it is wrong. About half the population of the country live outside of urban areas. Where rural people have to pay to build and maintain sewage systems, wells or group water schemes, residents of Cork, Dublin, Galway & Limerick don't have to pay a red cent towards their ongoing costs (and it shows in the state of the water network in the cities).

There's a subsidy paid in this country to keep the townies quiet and to hell with the rest of us, so take your hiking boots and hike along grand canal quay.

Icepick wrote: »

(decreases unsustainability)

At the moment the sustainability of wind is very unproven. Right now it's making other more flexible sources of fuel more important to balance the unpredictability of wind. Just take a look at today's generation figures - wind is producing more than forecast, which one might think is a good thing, but it creates other problems. There are other problems, when as often is the case that wind creates less power than forecast.

Wind energy has to be used immediately as it can't be easily stored. Fine you say close the wiers on Ardnacrusha and Inniscarra. Except we all remember what happened in Cork a couple of years ago when the water wasn't released form Inniscarra when it should have been (due to the search for somebody who went into the Lee).

Now the flooding in Cork was not the result of wind and I'm not trying to claim that, there were other factors involved such as the once in 300 year rainfall that happened at the time, which was worse than Dundrum got last year (it affected everything west of an imaginary line between Sligo and Youghal).


Coal and turf plants are harder to control, which is why the act as baseload for the system, so they can't be turned down easily.

That leaves us with natural gas - which still produces CO2, contributing to making it harder to meet those targets.

Before we start calling for wind power and other "renewable" sources we need to know the potential side effects and consequences of each type of generation equipment. E.g. what are the side effects of mining the raw materials? It's well known that the rare earth elements needed for the motors are largely mined in China, who don't give a rats ar*e about the environment - or the health of the workers. Could we be doing more damage by creating the turbines than burning fossil fuels or using nuclear reactors (if you're going to answer this one scientific evidence is required because it's not a no-brainer).

What are the effects of having the turbines too close together? It's well know than the turbines create wake turbulence, if they are too close together they interfere with each pother, drastically reducing the efficiency of the motors.

The motors themselves are not particularly efficient and have other problems. In cold weather they use electricity to keep the motors from seizing. This creates an extra burden on the grid at a time when (here in Ireland) we need the energy most.

They also interfere with local wild life, especially birds (though they're smart enough they'll figure out that they shouldn't fly near those big white things that move).

antoobrien wrote: »

Please don't try to con us with figures that support the notion that towns pay for rural areas when the census tells us otherwise (and the outcry of townies against paying for water makes it more laughable).

Also large Urban area's are subsdised by spending on Bus/train services, large inter city motorways. The other reality is that all government offices/hospital etc are base in large urabn centres so again a taxpayer subsidy to these area's from Rural/small urban centres. So just counting the cost of county councisl is misleadind

robp wrote: »

if you do it in a sensible and sensitive way

That one line says a lot about the planning approaches involved. Dogmatic (in the uk) vs practical (here).

It's probably worth looking at the motives of the people looking to protect the "landscape" in both cases.

In the UK it's generally the rich and the landed aristocracy who can afford homes in the countryside and are trying to preserve "the landscape". As one relative of mine up it: You want to build a house in my countryside - faff off the council answer to me not the voters.

Here it's largely city dwellers trying to save the landscape from the "clueless" locals - You want to build a house, but it'll spoil the view I see once every few months!

Maybe we should import country people to lobby in favour of the oil exploration off Dalkey Island the same way as most of the protesters in at Shell to Sea are not from Mayo, or even Connacht.

Deleted User wrote: »

So when I say renewables will never be good enough I mean for our total energy requirments and that is where the Thorium fits in, the idea is to reduce our independence on foreign imported fuels, Thorium can produce electricity for heating, and transport, and hydrogen for heavy goods use. I'm not convinced global warming is a result of man,

There was a debate on nuclear power in the infra forum - including thorium (see post 174 for the start of that) - however there are serious issues with it here. the first being that it's currently illegal (and our government has re-iterated a commitment not to look at it), the second being cost - for the price of one we cam build a motorway system, a few dozen hospitals or a few hundred schools.

While I like the idea of nuclear, the Thorium powered types are only at a research stage and are probably 10-20 years away from commercial development.

djpbarry wrote: »

A rough, back-of-an-envelope calculation will give you a pretty accurate estimate of how much a wind farm, for example, will cost over it's lifetime. But, how much will a nuclear power plant cost? That's a question that is extremely difficult to answer.

Nuclear is mature enough to know the ongoing costs over the lifetime of a plant - it's been around since the 50s. The newer plants will have lower costs due to the efficiencies and smaller amounts of waste produced.

Wind - well that's a different story. We think we know the maintenance costs, but they haven't been operating commercially long enough to see if our estimates are correct.

In a thread in sustainability & environment discussing the pollution being caused by china's production of the rare earth metals required for the turbines, one of the posters used eirgrids figures to do the back of the envelope calculations. Nuclear came out as only marginally more expensive than onshore wind (€80/TWH vs €75/TWH), with offshore wind being significantly more expensive (€125/TWH).

The poster's calculations are interesting because it takes into account the expected availability, various capital and operating costs associated with each type of energy - including storage of spent fuels, extra infrastructure required for bringing power from wind farms to the grid, costs associated with maintenance of offshore turbines etc.

djpbarry wrote: »

Is it? Tell that to Finland:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/business/energy-environment/29nuke.html?pagewanted=all

Take a read of the should we go nuclear thread - I'm not going over it again it was covered there extensively. IMO the poster has dealt with your issue adequately, i'm not going to argue the point, and I suspect we're not going to change each other's minds on the matter.

djpbarry wrote: »

Turbines have been in use since the dawn of electricity generation – I think estimates of maintenance costs are going to be pretty accurate.

I'm not a mechanical engineer, but to say that we know the costs because turbines have been around is a bit silly considering the fact that the power source driving the turbines is not continuous. It brings up a few common sense questions:

Are the stresses are the same as for wind turbines those used in hydro, thermal or steam powered turbines?
What effect does the fact that, unlike other turbines that act within closed systems, wind turbines act in the open are have on the turbine?
The what effect does the variability of the power source have on the turbines?

Sorry but without quantifying the effects of these we simply don't know the maintenance costs or what effect they will have on the efficiency of the turbines over their lifetime.

djpbarry wrote: »

Well that is interesting, given that the cost of storing spent fuel is extremely difficult to quantify, as nobody really knows how long it will need to be stored for.

Isn't science wonderful, it can be used to calculate the half-life of radioactive materials, tell you when they will decompose into at what, at what rates and how much shielding is required to seal it.

If you wish to ignore the accumulated knowledge of the past several centuries of science, engineering and construction's knowledge, you might want to revise your statement that we "know" what the maintenance costs of turbines will be - lest you be described as a hypocrite.