357 Tons & 115m High!!
LIMITATIONS?
Hi,
Quite Ridiculous!
100 of these ridiculous windmills @ just under £1Bn. To provide power for upto 200,000 homes but the windmills apparently only function fully for about 1/3 of the time due to too much or too little wind.
I note the MD of the company stated it cost his company £900M to build this but would not state what you and I paid in grants and was that part of the £900M or on top of?
He also said he expected his pay back period to be 7 or 8 years what is OUR payback?
I doubt it is by any way a paying proposition without grants and 10 or 15 years from now when the grants run out and the scam is over who, or the tax payer, will pay to dismantle this obscene eye sore?
The article below quotes windpower can deliver 3GW yet an article yesterday said 1,453MW as I recall and is this based on max output or the 1/3rd. they actually deliver – it all looks like a massive fudge!
NO ONE ever discusses the damage nor the environmental damage, nor the cost of removal, nor the infrastructure required for maintenance.
Drax with a 10GW output supplies power for 6,000,000 homes day in day out and a new generation Nuclear would probably supply 20GW or 12,000,000 homes relentlessly for half a century.
Regards,
Greg L-W.
March of the wind farm: World's biggest offshore turbine site to be switched on today off the Kent coast
By David Derbyshire
Last updated at 7:26 AM on 23rd September 2010
Last updated at 7:26 AM on 23rd September 2010
Arranged in formation like an advancing army, this is the world’s biggest offshore wind farm.
The array of more than 100 giant turbines towering over the North Sea will be switched on today off the coast of Kent.
The Thanet farm will be able to generate up to 300 megawatts (MW) of electricity, enough to power a small city – but only if the wind is strong enough.
Impressive sight: There are more than 100 giant turbines in the Thanet wind farm
It means that Britain is now the biggest offshore wind generator in the world, producing more electricity from sea-based turbines than the rest of the globe put together.
According to the wind industry, the UK’s wind farms now have a capacity of 5 gigawatts (GW) or enough power for nearly three million homes.
The creation of the monster farm is part of the Government’s ‘dash for wind’ – a massive expansion of green energy planned over the next decade which will see around 10,000 new turbines going up at sea and across the country.
The Government claims the wind farms are needed to slash greenhouse gas emissions from coal, oil and gas-fired power stations and meet Europe’s tough climate change targets.
To meet the targets, the UK will have to generate around a third of its electricity from renewables – such as wind, wave and wood-burning – by 2020.
However, critics say the expansion is costly and that the UK will become too dependent on the variable power of the wind.
While the last government enthusiastically embraced wind power, critics say it will fulfil barely a fraction of Britain’s energy needs – and at a huge cost. They also argue that huge wind turbines are a scar on Britain’s landscape, even when sited a few miles out to sea.
Dr Benny Peiser of the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation think-tank said: ‘It’s a complete waste of money. It costs three times as much to generate electricity from offshore wind and the cost is passed to taxpayers and in fuel bills.
‘And you need to back up wind farms with fossil fuel power stations when there’s no wind blowing.
‘Economically it doesn’t make sense and the savings in carbon emissions are not as great as their supporters claim.’
But a spokesman for the wind industry association RenewableUK said: ‘Five gigawatts is an important milestone.
‘Renewable energy generally and wind energy in particular is not alternative energy any longer – it is absolutely mainstream.’
The Thanet Offshore Wind Farm lies 7.5miles off Foreness Point, Margate, and will be visible from the coast on a clear day.
Swedish energy giant Vattenfall – which spent £780million on the array – refuses to say how long it will take for the farm to pay for itself.
Each turbine towers nearly 380 feet over the sea and stretches another 82 feet to the sea bed below. Working at full capacity, each can generate 3MW of electricity.
‘Until now we have been in the commissioning period where we have been testing each of the turbines,’ said a company spokesman yesterday.
‘All of them are now able to generate electricity, although they are not up to their full capacity yet.’
However, the farm will only generate its 300MW if the wind is blowing at 16 metres per second. The company estimates that on average, the farm will work at 35 to 40 per cent capacity.
City power: Each turbine towers nearly 380 feet over the sea and stretches another 82 feet to the sea bed below
Windy city: Working at full capacity, each can generate 3MW of electricity
Like all wind farms, the turbines have to be switched off if the wind is too strong.
‘You have to bear in mind that coal and gas-fired power stations don’t work at full capacity either – and even nuclear power stations are taken off line,’ the spokesman added.
According to the wind industry, Britain currently has another 18GW of wind capacity in construction and in the planning system. If that is added, wind farms could make up to a third of the country’s annual energy consumption.
Maria McCaffery of RenewableUK added: ‘Today’s developments are of tremendous significance.
‘In 2002 the UK was generating around 2 per cent of all electricity from renewables. We are now on the threshold of 10 per cent having increased outputs five-fold.’
Almost three quarters of the wind power generated in Britain actually comes from on shore turbines.
But the Government is also placing its faith in offshore farms, to take advantage of the strong winds around the coast.
The sort of high-pressure weather system that brought freezing temperatures to the UK last winter – and dramatically increased demand from the National Grid – is often accompanied by very little wind.
Read more: CLICK HERE
Via the blogs, we learn that feed-in tariffs are a total rip-off. But how can that message possibly prevail when the BBC's "take" is that buying in to the scam offers "a great return on investment!" And, needless to say, the Beeb is also talking up the news that the world's biggest offshore wind farm off the Kent coast has been officially opened.
As always, the BBC sprays out figures, but no information. We get told that there are 100 turbines in the £780m wind farm, and that these "are expected to generate enough electricity to power 240,000 homes" – perhaps the most dishonest way going of describing the capacity of these machines.
In fact, getting proper statistics from the media is a losing battle, but Vattenfall, the project owner, has it on its website that there are 100 Vestas V90 wind turbines, with a total capacity of 300 MW. This is sufficient, it says, to supply more than 200,000 homes per year with clean energy.
By the time you take in the load factors (about 26 percent), however, and apply the rather understated government-inspired domestic consumption factor, you actually get 131,000 homes – but even then the figure is fiction. On cold, windless days, the number is zero. On a breezy summer night, when the power isn't needed anyway and the National Grid is having to pay suppliers not to produce electricity, it could be a lot more. Such are the games they play.
But there are no games when it comes to the subsidies. On top of the £40 million in electricity sales, Vattenfall will collect at least £60 million a year in Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs) top-sliced from our electricity bills so that we do not notice the theft. And theft it is, an undisclosed tax paid to these rip-off merchants for producing unsustainable electricity.
Over term for the 20 years these turbines are suppose to last, we are looking at a public subsidy of £1.2 billion – enough to build a 1GW nuclear power station – a plant with a deliverable capacity more than 13 times this wind array. That is the extent of the rip-off to which we are being subjected.
And for that, it appears, we get 21 full-time green jobs. But if we gave them a million each and told them to get lost, that is not even a rounding error on the amount we are dealing with. We would get to "save" (i.e., not spend) £1.2 billion, less £0.021 billion. Instead, we pay - effectively - nearly £60m per job for the 20 years. These must be the most expensive jobs on the planet - we could even have 20 David Camerons for the price of each worker.
As with my previous thread, I ask why we tolerate this. That much, of course, is rhetoric. We tolerate it because, individually, we are powerless against the might of the state. But that will not always be the case. We need to make it so before the state ruins us.
This bit was nicked from Oooop North CLICK HERE
"In politics, stupidity is not a handicap." Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821),
Regards,
Greg L-W.
for all my contact details & Blogs: CLICK HERE
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