[johntheexpat]

The small town next along is on a designated route for large and exceptional convoys. But when the wind turbine convoy came to town, it was almost too large and too exceptional. But the gallant French battled through. The convoy was delayed overnight as lamp-posts and road-signs were removed and the traffic was held up for several hours as the convoy manoeuvered around the 'roundabout'. (The night before, which I missed was even better as the convoy became stuck and traffic was backed up for miles in every direction. The town is basically a staging post for travelling to Tours, Saumur, La Fleche, Angers, Le Mans etc etc and so is quite a busy junction.

easiest to go over the roundabout, once enough road-signs had been removed. (and several lamp-posts)

It's big

Very big

doing a 3 point turn with a 50M trailer. I was impressed.

A tricky target area to reverse into. The tip of the propellor missed the bridge by what looked like a hands width.

No problem here, the cab missed the house by at least 20cm.

One of the Convoy Support Vehicles. The only thing I can say is, thank goodness its a LHD van.

[DOBLY]

Fantastic pictures John.

In my part of the world there is already one wind farm which is (to me) a marvellous sight and resource. Another one is planned not too far away and guess who is complaining? Why, of course, it's the farmers who can't get over the fact that it will be visible from their land - a landscape that they have changed forever by their "outdoor factory" (my words) practices. Farmers ? Hypocrites?, surely not !!

[JagoPlasma]

fantastic pics. i knew these things were huge but
is this a new design as i didnt realised they curved?

I love the sight of wind turbines. i find them asthetically pleasing and they look clean... which i guess is what they are there to represent.

rather see that than a coal powered monsrtosity

[johntheexpat]

A couple more shots with a somewhat better view of the curvature of these things.
...and some of the locals enjoying the spectacle!

[domtheone]

Originally Posted by JagoPlasma

fantastic pics. i knew these things were huge but
is this a new design as i didnt realised they curved?

I love the sight of wind turbines. i find them asthetically pleasing and they look clean... which i guess is what they are there to represent.

rather see that than a coal powered monsrtosity

Yep. Nice pics OP

Total agree Jago.

I see the Wind Turbines here occasionally on my travels in the UK and every year when I head off to Grand Canaria.

Personally, I think they look miles better than some massive power station blotting the landscape.

Now I can't comment on the noise aspect that I hear peeps moaning about as i've never been near to one for any length of time but, putting that aside, I simpy cannot understand the "don't want that in my backyard" (as long as it's littererally not in someones backyard) negativity towards them.

People in the country side need to get a grip. We have to change and if that means having these huge (but by no means visually unappealing) things dotted around the countryside, so be it. Shirley many of them will be offshore anyway.

If push came to shove, i'd rather a few thousand of these than umpteen Coal/Nuclear etc etc power stations anyway.

[splatz]

I have heard some people object to them because they kill/injure birds. I cannot find any stats on this so cannot say if this is true or not.

Personally I like the look of them.

Of course the real problem with wind turbines is that you need to have a certain amount of wind for them to work

[JagoPlasma]

Well i just bought a house at an old RAF base which is surrounded by fields. id love seeing wind turbines on my way home. and id love the cheaper bills we should get! (though you just know we wont)

looking into getting a wind generator myself to stick ontop of the house. but doubt id be able to afford the 75k Euro Tesler roadster to go with it

[RobDickinson]

They suck because wind isnt consistent and you need to keep coal/gas/oil powerstations available to take up the slack and peaks, which is worse than just running the fossils all the time.

[wavefront]

If only there was some way to store power.

[johntheexpat]

Originally Posted by RobDickinson

They suck because wind isnt consistent and you need to keep coal/gas/oil powerstations available to take up the slack and peaks, which is worse than just running the fossils all the time.

Originally Posted by wavefront

If only there was some way to store power.

The other option is to use wind power to supply those requirements that are flexible. Years ago, and I don't know if it is still the case but probably not, there was a chlorine/bleach manufacturing plant in Merseyside which used to take up to 3% of the UK electricity production. Now, the great thing about this plant was that it was flexible in its consumption, so if the electricity demand was high, then it didn't produce chlorine, but when demand was low it would take huge quantites. This of course enable the power stations to run at a better approximation to a steady load, which is the most efficient way to produce electricity.
It also used to be the case that gas to industry was supplied on an interruptible basis, so that when cold snaps happened, gas could be diverted from industry to domestic use.
Aluminium smelting is a case that could work well with a non-reliable electricity source, as production depends on electricity, but it doesn't really matter if the supply is interrupted occasionally. (you would have to keep the smelters hot, but most of the electricity goes to producing Aluminium, so it could easily be flexible).
So, there are ways, but it would mean a bit of a change from our current addiction to tight production schedules and daily targets and what-have-you.

[Sonic67]

I think it takes something like 300 turbines to replace a coal power station. That's assuming they are all working hard as well. As they may not you will need to add a lot more. Then you need to add roads for access and servicing, and transformers and cables to take the power away to the grid.

Most people see wind turbines as a half a dozen sat on a hill and don't see a problem. Stick a few hundred in the countryside with roads, pylons and transformers around and they might not be quite so pretty.

[RobDickinson]

Originally Posted by wavefront

If only there was some way to store power.

There is. But it'd take a massive investment to do this over the UK, your talking about that hydro power storage place in wales * 1000

[Wild Weasel]

There's actually 4 large pump storage facilities in the UK. Two in Wales & two in Scotland. They're working on local energy storage techniques that use the likes of compressed air, advanced batteries/capacitors & flywheels.

Even when these technologies are perfected, wind power will always be troublesome to integrate & overrated. No amount of hype & clever bribes lobbying will get around their real world limitations. Wind speeds are extremely variable, which means turbines probably generate only 30% of their annual potential (not counting large transmission losses from their remote locations). On average there'll be one day a week when they're not turning at all. Countries like Denmark with large wind farms get around it by balancing their grid with those of neighbouring countries. Plus they're fugly.

[johntheexpat]

Originally Posted by Wild Weasel

Even when these technologies are perfected, wind power will always be troublesome to integrate & overrated. No amount of hype & clever bribes lobbying will get around their real world limitations. Wind speeds are extremely variable, which means turbines probably generate only 30% of their annual potential (not counting large transmission losses from their remote locations).

The trick will be to use them where continuity of supply isn't the over-riding factor.
It does seem that most of the large wind-farms of the future will be built out at sea. The visual impact there is much less and you can have larger turbines.
So, there you are all at sea, generating electricity (occasionally), surrounded by water, which when you electrolyse it gives hydrogen, which is apparently one of the fuels of the future. Cover the turbine in solar panels, just for good measure too and your wind farm becomes a hydrogen farm.
But at the moment, the technology is still young and being researched, which is I suppose, much easier with turbines on a hill than with turbines in the middle of the ocean.

[Corey USA]

wind turbines is designed as supplemental and there is the storage issue as well which you need a special compasitor and energy cell.

Still this is an example of why relying on technology to "undo" damage by our excessive consumption is totally flawed.

REDUCE CONSUMPTION IS THE ONLY WAY. for it does not add any problems to "undo" to begin with.

[Wild Weasel]

Originally Posted by johntheexpat

The trick will be to use them where continuity of supply isn't the over-riding factor.
It does seem that most of the large wind-farms of the future will be built out at sea. The visual impact there is much less and you can have larger turbines.
So, there you are all at sea, generating electricity (occasionally), surrounded by water, which when you electrolyse it gives hydrogen, which is apparently one of the fuels of the future. Cover the turbine in solar panels, just for good measure too and your wind farm becomes a hydrogen farm.
But at the moment, the technology is still young and being researched, which is I suppose, much easier with turbines on a hill than with turbines in the middle of the ocean.

The Hindenberg aside, I think Hydrogen has huge potential too.

Another is solar furnaces (an array of computer controlled mirrors pointing at a boiler mounted on a large tower). Currently they use water as the heating medium, which drives steam turbines. They're now moving to molten salt, which can go a lot hotter and hold on to the heat for longer. That enables it to generate power throughout the night and when clouds pass over. I doubt they'd ever be viable in our climate, but there are a lot of countries out there who could be onto a nice little earner one day.

[Corey USA]

Originally Posted by Wild Weasel

The Hindenberg aside, I think Hydrogen has huge potential too.

Another is solar furnaces (an array of computer controlled mirrors pointing at a boiler mounted on a large tower). Currently they use water as the heating medium, which drives steam turbines. They're now moving to molten salt, which can go a lot hotter and hold on to the heat for longer. That enables it to generate power throughout the night and when clouds pass over. I doubt they'd ever be viable in our climate, but there are a lot of countries out there who could be onto a nice little earner one day.

With hydrogen oxygen becomes the pollutant when it reaches a certain point. Oxygen will accelerate cell activity. This is a known fact in medical field. It can be bad if it goes on too long. Too high in oxygen can be bad for plant life as well.

Hydrogen drives from splitting water into the two and oxygen is just released in to the atmosphere. we need to keep the gas mix with in a certain threshold in order to sustain life. this threshold is very narrow due to the variety of life dependent on a certain ratio which is different from another. example lots of co2 good for plants bad for us to much oxygen good for us bad for plants, see my point?

[johntheexpat]

Originally Posted by Corey USA

With hydrogen oxygen becomes the pollutant when it reaches a certain point. Oxygen will accelerate cell activity. This is a known fact in medical field. It can be bad if it goes on too long. Too high in oxygen can be bad for plant life as well.

Hydrogen drives from splitting water into the two and oxygen is just released in to the atmosphere. we need to keep the gas mix with in a certain threshold in order to sustain life. this threshold is very narrow due to the variety of life dependent on a certain ratio which is different from another. example lots of co2 good for plants bad for us to much oxygen good for us bad for plants, see my point?

Hopefully your fears will be unfounded as more or less as soon as the hydrogen is produced, (hopefully via a 'green' route) it will be used as an energy source and thus recombined with the oxygen. I can't see mankind holding onto hydrogen for any great length of time, and it would be almost impossible to build up a strategic reserve of it, I would guess. A small proportion of the H2 produced would undoubtedly escape into the atmosphere, where it may even be lost to space, but hopefully that imbalance would be insignificant for centuries, if not millenia and by then we should have moved on from hydrogen to something even better.

[splatz]

Originally Posted by Corey USA

we need to keep the gas mix with in a certain threshold in order to sustain life. this threshold is very narrow due to the variety of life dependent on a certain ratio which is different from another. example lots of co2 good for plants bad for us to much oxygen good for us bad for plants, see my point?

I think you need to keep a sense of scale. CO2 is practically a trace element in the atmosphere (0.0383% or 383 ppmv). Oxygen is the second most abundant gas (20.946% or 209,460 ppmv). Methane is even smaller (0.0001745% or 1.745 ppmv)

I seriously doubt mankind could produce anything that would influence the composition on a planetary scale to the point where there is too much oxygen for plants and too much CO2 for us.

So I don't see why "we need to keep the gas mix within a certain threshold". We can't change the gas mix even if we tried.

[Corey USA]

Don't underestimate the power we have to affect this world. The ice melt up north should be evidence of that in that, its happening now not 50years from now. It also shows that it only takes a minor change to make a major impact when thinking in minor scales on a planetary scale.

Look at the fact when we burn coal it releases even less mercury than co2 yet it has a major impact to the point that we have to limit the amount of fish we can eat as a result. that mercury would not be released at all if it was not for our direct action which is smaller that the direct action of the co2 we release.

Also the gases we release are smaller in particulate size meaning it stay suspended longer than say the ash spewed by a volcano. Volcano ash eventually settles where fine gases we put out do not. which tips the impact scale of the amount of damage done towards the human side when looking at the impact it has on earth. Also there is the accumulation factor to take in our release is constant and adds up.

[ad47uk]

Originally Posted by johntheexpat

The trick will be to use them where continuity of supply isn't the over-riding factor.
It does seem that most of the large wind-farms of the future will be built out at sea. The visual impact there is much less and you can have larger turbines.
So, there you are all at sea, generating electricity (occasionally), surrounded by water, which when you electrolyse it gives hydrogen, which is apparently one of the fuels of the future. Cover the turbine in solar panels, just for good measure too and your wind farm becomes a hydrogen farm.
But at the moment, the technology is still young and being researched, which is I suppose, much easier with turbines on a hill than with turbines in the middle of the ocean.

Wind farms are a waste of time, what happens when the wind dies down? You got it normal electric generating stations takes over and to do that they have to be working at more or less their normal rate, other wise they would not be able to take over quick enough.

It is ok for people saying about building more of these eye sores, but you try living near them, you may think again.

[ad47uk]

Originally Posted by Corey USA

wind turbines is designed as supplemental and there is the storage issue as well which you need a special compasitor and energy cell.

Still this is an example of why relying on technology to "undo" damage by our excessive consumption is totally flawed.

REDUCE CONSUMPTION IS THE ONLY WAY. for it does not add any problems to "undo" to begin with.

Not going to happen, more and more gadgets are being sold which needs power. Bigger T.V's that use more energy, set top boxes, even lots of mobile phones that need charging.

Tree huggers living in dream land again.

[Sonic67]

And add in a world with an ever increasing population. Demand is going to keep going up.

[johntheexpat]

Originally Posted by johntheexpat

The trick will be to use them where continuity of supply isn't the over-riding factor.

.... which when you electrolyse it gives hydrogen, which is apparently one of the fuels of the future. Cover the turbine in solar panels, just for good measure too and your wind farm becomes a hydrogen farm.

Originally Posted by ad47uk

Wind farms are a waste of time, what happens when the wind dies down? ....

Can someone please remind me why I bother?
ad47uk quotes me giving a use for wind turbines (ie hydrogen generation by electrolysis) where continuity of wind is not essential and then starts banging on about how naff they are because the wind can't be relied on.

Perhaps if I put salient points in bold, or perhaps some people just don't want to listen?

[andykn]

Originally Posted by ad47uk

Wind farms are a waste of time, what happens when the wind dies down?

You could ask all the countries who are building lots of them.

Or just realise that the wind doesn't die down across the whole country at once, there is always enough wind overall to produce enough electricity in enough places to make a contribution. To add to that from solar, which is likely to be higher when wind is lower.

[Tim Cooper]

Originally Posted by ad47uk

Not going to happen, more and more gadgets are being sold which needs power. Bigger T.V's that use more energy, set top boxes, even lots of mobile phones that need charging.

Tree huggers living in dream land again.

Your solution is........?????

[ad47uk]

Originally Posted by Tim Cooper

Your solution is........?????

Nuclear, the only way to go, the problem is Nuclear waste, but it is a dam sight better than having noisy horrid looking windmills all over the place.

[andykn]

Originally Posted by ad47uk

Nuclear, the only way to go, the problem is Nuclear waste, but it is a dam sight better than having noisy horrid looking windmills all over the place.

You'll not have seen a power station, then? Cooling towers, clouds'n'all.

The amazing view we have from a house we rent in Cornwall now has wind turbines in the distance - much better than a power stataion inho.

[ad47uk]

Originally Posted by andykn

You'll not have seen a power station, then? Cooling towers, clouds'n'all.

The amazing view we have from a house we rent in Cornwall now has wind turbines in the distance - much better than a power stataion inho.

As you said it is in the distance, to you, you just try living close to a wind turbine. My brother lived in Lincs and when I was up there I was talking to someone who lived close to one of these wind turbines and had put the house on the market, it knocked the price down and that was about 4 years back when the market was good. Accordng to him the noise from those things keeps him awake.


I rather have a Nuclear station supplying my electric than unreliable wind power. But then we get tree huggers not wanting nuclear, they want us to go and live back in the caves.


You only need one nuclear station to supply power to a large amount of people, you need many, many wind farms to do the same thing and you have to rely on the wind.


I hope the one they want to set up in the countryside around here is shot down in flames, which I think it will be anyway, a lot of people have gone against it. What amazes me is how far these companies wil go to stop people getting their voices heard by stealing signs made up by the Anti-wind farm group.

[Tim Cooper]

Originally Posted by ad47uk

Nuclear, the only way to go, the problem is Nuclear waste, but it is a dam sight better than having noisy horrid looking windmills all over the place.

Your predilection for the words "tree hugger" concerns me We all MUST become custodians of this our ONLY home, not just for the current generation but those to come.
Nuclear power generation, agreed, has it's place for the short to medium term, don't forget though that Uranium & it's isotopes are a finite resource & some of it coming from unstable countries/regimes (another middle east any one).
Clean coal technology: For the immediate/ short term would be one of the most cost effective methods because it's "doable" now.
Co2 sequestration: Is also "doable" now with the capture & storage of excess carbon either via chemical/biological conversion.
Renewables: wind, solar, hydro all have their place, however this knee jerk we are experiencing now is distracting us from the real issues, these technologies in their current forms can only be supplemental to our current needs.
Everyone who lives a western or near western lifestyle pollutes, period.
One of the biggest impacts we can have upon reducing carbon emissions is to bear pressure upon the USA to ratify the Kyoto Protocol & to pursuade the emerging economies (China & India being the biggest) to embrace clean energy technologies.
Economies: The waste from the first world is staggering, from decadently lighting our cities to driving massive gas guzzling vehicles to our western lifestyle, this has to be addressed.
The demonisation of so called Global Warming denier's, please, this has to stop, from the layman to the professional let them speak, have a listen to what they have to say/offer otherwise (for fear of ridicule) they say nothing, at our peril IMHO.
Population: We can barely feed the world as is, something has to be done to curb population growth.
We have wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, if we don't our children/grandchildren will be burdened by our failures.
These are my own ramblings.
Tim.