The Express reports:
Conservative Owen Patterson, Secretary of the Department for Environment, Food and rural affairs (Defra) has commissioned a major report on renewable energy and the rural economy.
But sources have claimed that Liberal Democrat Ed Davey, who is head of Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), wants to stop the report being published as it could paint wind turbines in a negative light.
Getting the material pre-chopped has to be a help, but some of the birds are raptors so the sausage isn’t kosher, if that matters.
Wow! That clears it up completely! 🙂
Great link too. I may have to include that in my wind blog! I bet people just don’t realize there’s good energy and bad energy. I half expect the company to have animated bunnies featured in a video somewhere frolicking through the “happy turbines” and “majestic panels” that give us electricity. Hey, it worked for a battery……
In the 70s, transmission lines carried bad energy. Wind and solar are good energy. Simples.
http://www.goodenergy.co.uk
A sausage maker?
I meant several thousand square miles per one up there. Stupid cell phone keyboard 🙂
It would be fun to export a few of the towers in social that look like Palm Trees to Northern England/Scotland. 🙂
The have pine tree ones too but that wouldn’t be fun.
Agreed though you need some infrastructure – but wind and solar use land very inefficiently. Several square miles of solar for instance to equate a one square mile nuke plant. Land efficiency is rarely discussed.
Kudos!
General rule: Politics will survive in service of science, but science cannot survive in service of politics. Science is the one at risk.
The guy getting the large check for the land rental. He does nothing and gets paid very handsomely. Of course, you never get something for nothing and some have come to regret the turbines (generally those who actually live in the area–many landowners live far away from the turbines and don’t care. They get money.)
The roads required for deliveries are the same ones the people who live in the rural area use. If you are off grid, then yes, you probably need a generator (which can be propane). Wind and solar alone rarely are sufficient. Agreed, too that cell towers do torque some people off.
There will be some system but that should be decided by the people in the area and the best science available, not the group that can get the largest subsidy and has the “correct” political beliefs. What is most annoying about wind is that the very same people who screamed about transmission lines in the 70’s and how landscapes are “ruined” by oil and gas development have no problem pillaging an area with wind and solar and suddenly loving the transmission lines (as I recall, they can kill you if you live to close–that was the story at the time).
Howdy marque2
The oil and coal deliveries require roads and vehicles; electricity requires transmission lines or a home generator. And believe me, that inconspicuous cell tower has torqued off someone.
Infrastructure is part of any technological society. The wind turbines are very likely a bad system but there’s going to be some system.
Internet via satellite is hideously expensive and slow.
Who, in their right mind, wants one of those damned overpriced bird grinders in their own back yard.
Good point. I get propane once every month or so and my internet is a small antenna on the south side of my house. The internet requires there be a radio tower near enough. Actually, the satellite dishes I had for TV are more intrusive and they’re the smallest ones. Not much intrusion on the landscape.
I don’t know about that. You get your oil or coal delivery once a month and get internet via satellite or via a few inconspicuous cell towers.
Any energy production and distribution system known to engineering has its benefits and its drawbacks. Wind turbines are generally long on negatives and short on positives and their cost-benefit calculus looks terrible to me. High-tension power lines, necessary for any distribution system, are rarely considered scenic either, though. If the rural community residents want internet and heating, they’re going to have to live with infrastructure.
You mean the report might tell the truth?
I love “We need everything in the energy mix”. This is the same logic that said investors should be told to buy from Bernie Madoff because their investments “needed everything in the mix.”