Apparently Ed Miliband

Yeah…..great

 

I've certainly never heard that one mate. Cost is one thing, carbon footprint is another - which is high whatever power generation method you build. However, once built and working and properly maintained, they could conceivably produce power for centuries and cost little to demolish. Contrast with other "green" technologies like Nuclear Fission, the building cost and carbon footprint is massively greater per Giga Watt, they cost more to maintain and humungously more to decommission at the end of their lifespan. Not to mention the risks associated with reactor meltdown and the disposal of spent fuel rods. The other great white hope of "green" power generation; Nuclear Fusion is, as ever, still 30 years away and the risks associated are equally severe, I wouldn't want a mini Sun or Thermonuclear device operating at the end of my street.

I'd rather stick with a few nice windmills thank you very much, although it would be nice id they painted them a more neutral colour than stark white.

 

Cheers. You never disappoint mate.

 

Don’t be a NIMBY.

 

the arguments are a lot more complex than an acronym.

 

I wonder if Ed Milliband knows where we get our power from when the sun don't shine and the wind doesn't blow. It's not cost effective because you still need existing power stations to supply the country. So you have to pay for the stations stood still and the renewable generators unless we build a battery as big as Yorkshire to store the energy. Some people have and are going to make a lot of money out of it and we are paying for it.

 

Companies and individuals will make money from new energy sources, of course. But isn't it time we stopped literally spending billions to subsidise the polluters destroying our natural world? You've also families like the Drax family (ex tory mp would you believe?) being subsidised by the billion to generate biomass fuel... Which just last week was found to be 4 times more polluting than your remaining coal powered stations.

Sadly, as a species, we've failed to heed our own warnings, so the choices left are ones we'll either not willingly take (population reduction) or to try and mitigate our destruction through renewable energy.

 

Drax is so big we can't do with out it at the moment, plus it only burns a fraction of renewable to keep it on the bars ahead of cleaner gas stations. To many people in the world is destroying it we need to stop breeding.

 

At the rate global birth rates are falling, we are close to peak humanity. It is expected to get to 10-11billion before birth rates and population start falling again. However, the American Christian loons (and Space Karen) are pushing people to have more kids because they are scared of darker faces and being a minority.

 

Very rare for neither one to happen in GB though!

 

Not true mate, at power stations they have what are called Flow Cells. The ones in use now rely on lead/acid technology. So what happens is to store the energy, you apply the voltage to the cell and pump the fluid through. The fluid changes chemically - that change would in an ordinary battery render it fully charged. However, because the fluid is pumped through, the battery never gets fully charged. When discharging, the fluid is pumped in the opposite direction and current generated in the output circuit. The only limitation is the size of the tanks holding the 2 fluids. My son did his PHd in Chemistry working on new chemistry to use in these flow cells which would dramatically reduce the amount of fluid needed and therefore increase the capacity.

Power storage is not a problem, the state of the National Grid, however, is a major problem at the moment.

 

I wish I could like this more than once. I see people often use the argument that it's all a green con to make the politicians mates rich, as if no-one is getting rich off the back of fossil fuels.

 

Of course, the ones publicly using the "green con" arguments (Farage, Tice, various Tories, Trump, etc.) are funded by the fossil fuel industry.

 

Absolutely. There is so much lobbying, and false / misleading information pushed through the MSM by people invested in fossil fuels that it is increasingly difficult for the average Joe to get information that is not highly partisan. They are not going to give up their revenue streams without the mother of all fights.

 

One of the big American oil companies commissioned a report back in the 1960s about the effects of burning fossil fuels on the planet. It concluded that it would cause global warming due to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They then suppressed the report.

 

Renewable is already cheaper to produce per unit than Gas, Oil or Coal.

And we live in one of the windiest places on earth.

 

I'm a big fan of renewable energy and also think the turbines are quite beautiful (mesmeric in the same way as a real coal fire ... could stare at them for hours).
However, I've always been curious to know if there were enough of them would they have an impact on the weather (wind patterns)?

The law of conservation of energy, also known as the first law of thermodynamics, states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can change forms

So my question is: if we end up drawing enough energy from them to power this country that seems like a lot of energy that we have removed from the wind.
Genuinely don't know if that amount is insignificant or would it actually slow the wind and in some way effect climate? Or alternatively, am I being a complete numpty?

 

This is not the forum to question the wisdom of Comrade Ed.

 

It is the forum, however, to be presented with straightforward facts. The rest is up to you.

 

I have no doubt that mankind will forever create new problems from what it initially sees as solutions.