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Is wind power anything more than an expensive political sop?
A letter to The Daily Telegraph, Saturday, 9 January 2010, entitled “Windmills not for turning” read:
SIR - I am sitting here in the heart of the Trossachs National Park on a beautiful sunny morning, munching on my toast. The view would be incomparable except for the 20-odd windmills on the hill in of me.
After one of the coldest nights ever recorded, minus 21C (minus 6F) I believe, and right in the midst of a peak demand time for electric power from schools, offices, businesses, and me (making my tea and toast), how many were contributing to this need for power?
Not a damned one.
Dave Cooper
Callander, Perthshire
Over the past half century we have had many scares over the availability of fuel oils and natural gas. But every time supplies seemed to be getting scarce, more oilfields were discovered and more productive wells were drilled and came online. So far there has been no real shortage, apart from political machinations which has disrupted supplies.
But now we face another, possibly more serious, threat: environmentalism.
Coal is a great source of energy as a fuel for stationery equipment, such as electrical power generation. Converting it to the smokeless fuel, coke, produces coal gas, which is also a superb fuel for electricity generation as well as for heating domestic and commercial premises, just as natural gas is today.
When Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, closed down Britain's coal mines in the mid-1980s, it was calculated that the UK still had sufficient coal stocks to last another 300 years. That coal is still there.
The problem today is that coal, like any other fossil fuel, produces carbon dioxide, and this is thought by some environmentalists to be causing 'man-made global warming'. As a consequence, what coal-fired power stations still exist are being phased out in the UK and other western countries, and being replaced by wind turbines. Wind turbines are seen as being 'carbon free' and a 'sustainable' source of energy.
We are told that "The UK is the windiest country in Europe, so much so that we could power the whole country several times over using wind energy."
That could be true, but these turbines need an average wind speed of 14mph to convert wind energy into electricity — and during the past couple of weeks over the period of the coldest winter the UK has known for many decades, not only hasn't there been a wind speed of 14mph, for most of the time there has been no wind at all!
And electricity generated when the wind is over 14 mph cannot be stored for use when it isn't.
In these conditions, the useless monoliths to mankind's short-sighted foolishness have to be backed up by coal-fired power stations! And the EU and IPCC have decreed that our coal-fired stations must be shut down
UK-Energy-saving.com say that currently, UK wind power consists of over 2700 wind turbines which collectively have the capacity to produce more than 4000 MW of electricity — enough to power over 2,000,000 homes.
But that's only true when the wind blows; they are quite useless when it doesn't, and when the wind speed is either too low or too high..
I agree that there is no point in using fossil fuels unnecessarily and wastefully, as there is no doubt that fossil fuels will run out eventually, but wasting the energy we have on building and maintaining hugely costly (in both monetary and energy terms) wind turbines, rather than, say, nuclear power stations, which also don't emit carbon dioxide, seems to me to be the height of political correctness gone wrong. And since the CO2 produced by coal-fired power stations has not been shown to have adverse effects, these are a cheaper option until the nuclear stations are built.
And this waste of resources is compounded when we consider that, at present, a new cooler (ice) age is looking decidedly more likely than a warming. In which case, we could well need both coal and nuclear.
I realise that my assertion that a new cool period is more likely than a warming will be controversial, so I've included two graphs below from Joe d'Aleo, chairman of the American Meteorological Society. The first shows that global temperatures since 1895 show no correlation with CO2 levels, and that temperatures have gone down more often than the have gone up. The second shows that despite continually and consistently rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere, global temperatures have fallen over this century. This latest winter in the northern hemisphere also suggests that the fall in global temperatures over the last few years is continuing.
Last updated 12 January 2010
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