- Digging up landfills won't produce energy in facilities such as this. This is to recover the materials that are now running low and getting extremely expensive such as metals.
Correct, I agree now I've read up
- For the same reason throwing more stuff away isn't the answer as we still need to recycle the materials. We could burn waste plastics but with oil supplies becomeing more and more expensive that make not be the best use of the resource either
It may happen, but as plastics require oil and energy, best use is recycling.
- Windpower is not as useless as its critics make out. A small country like Denmark produces over 20% of its electricity from windpower, Portugal 19%, 16% in Spain and 14% in Ireland yet critics here allege it would be impossible for the UK▸ to do more than 12% because of it is intermittent. Yet we still only produce a fraction of this because of the nimbys. We need a mix of energy sources
Hmm. Denmark has the highest energy prices in Europe by a large margin. It gives much of its output free to its neighbours when it can't use it all, but has to buy it back when the wind drops. It is heavily dependent on imported electricity, and has not been able to decommission a single conventional power station. All that whilst producing only 20% of its electricity from wind. Imagine how bad it would be if it tried to generate all of its power from wind.
A
study of Dutch wind power found that the actual saving in emissions is as low as 4% of the claimed figures, and that once more than 20% of power is generated by wind, the saving becomes negative.
The Adam Smith Institute, not known for uninformed expostulation, published a report
"Renewable Energy: Vision or mirage?", which found it was mirage.
As for NIMBYs, I am a NIABY - Not In Anyone's Back Yard. Talk to anybody who lives within a mile of the hated Fullabrook subsidy farm in North Devon, as I have, and you will hate them with a passion, as I do. (Not the people, but the turbines, I add to avoid confusion!)
The turbines often use Neodymium, as much as two tonnes of a Neodymium-based alloy in direct drive turbines. The production of this, mainly behind the closed doors of countries with lower regard for environmental standards and the health of its citizens (OK, China) is one of the great environmental scandals of all time, at least according to the
Daily Mail, which I know is hardly a paragon of balanced reportage. Read it anyway. So we don't remove pollution, but export it somewhere convenient.
I used to think vaguely that wind turbines were a wonderful idea, and would save us all. Later, I researched what I could, and found that they are actually ineffective, expensive, polluting, ugly, and likely to ruin us all. I have helped two people recover form heroin addiction. Helping greenies get off their awful addiction to wind turbines is much harder.
- Unless we start producing more power from some source soon the light will start going out sooner than we think. That probably means as much wind, wave tidal, energy from waste and even nuclear power as we can build.
Aye, there's the rub. By reference to tide tables, I could work out how much energy could be available at a tidal station on any date in the year 2112. I cannot even guess what wind power will be available in the next 10 minutes. Yet the money that could help develop wave/tidal power is being thrown at wind farms to generate subsidies, along with a small amount of electricity that may or may not prove inconvenient to the national grid at the time it arrives. National Grid pays millions to wind farm operators each year to shut them down when they are producing too much.
As the Government knew 25 years ago that energy provision would become an enormous problem as the first and second generations of nuclear power stations closed, along with all the coal fired stations, it is awful that nothing was done. At the same time, it is understandable, because nuclear wins or loses lots of votes, nuclear power stations take 20 years to design and build, and governments have a life of 5 years. We need science to inform the debate, rather than emotion.
Government aspiration is for electricity to be the main power source at the point of consumption, with gas, oil, nuke etc being the means to generate power. In railway terms, especially for projects such as metros, this makes perfect sense. Short rail routes with frequent stops will be much more efficient and much less polluting if they can pick up their power from an overhead line than if they have to carry fuel with them. As an occasional hobby pilot, I know that I always have to balance the payload against the fuel, and that the payload will always include the fuel. In any other form of transport, one may always pull over to the side of the road and call the RAC if it goes wrong, but in aviation you only have too much fuel if you are on fire.
HSTs▸ can carry 2000 gallons of diesel, something that impacts on their fuel efficiency.
