Friday, September 05, 2008

Some more reasons to dislike wind power

1.  EU Referendum welcomes a BBC report which goes some way towards acknowledging that Denmark's wind power experiment shouldn't be replicated, particularly in the UK where we aren't connected into other countries and, therefore, able to sell off excess wind energy (at a massive loss) like the Danes do.  Alas, it won't be possible for us to emulate their expensive and surprisingly high emission (primarily because they banned nuclear they emit more greenhouse gas per ton of oil equivalent) energy.

2.  Some great facts in this video, via Iain Murray:


It is a good video.  It sets out how utterly impractical the idea of generating all our power from wind is (the numbers are from the States but I think it scales pretty well).  Funnily enough, though, it actually chooses the standard most favourable to wind, the amount of power produced.

Unfortunately, we don't just need power, we need it when we want it.  Unless we're willing to accept the lights going out on a cold, still evening (and there are lots of those, see page 13 of this PDF).  In that regard wind is nearly completely useless.  So, unless you outsource the need to produce reliable power to other countries (like Denmark) or are prepared to accept the massive cost and reduction in efficiency that comes with maintaining huge quantities of back up power