More wind power for the UK

[Penny Walters]

Hey guys,

Did anybody see this - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ddb52464-d1b6-11e1-bb82-00144feabdc0.html

Looks like the UK is going to become more reliant on wind power, which is certainly a good thing :)

[Rob Beckers]

"The UK is planning 1.8GW in wind energy", that works out to 300 monster-size 6MW turbines. Quite the project...

It's good to see that not all countries are giving up on renewables now that oil prices have come down (and will stay relatively low for the foreseeable future it seems).

-RoB-

[Penny Walters]

Totally agree, I think that falling oil prices could actually help projects like these.

They should lower the cost of transporting and constructing turbines and this may encourage the creation of more wind farms.

[Chris Olson]

Actually, I believe oil prices have a minimal impact on the generation of electricity. Most electricity is generated by coal or natural gas. Only from the standpoint that petroleum is used in mining the fuels primarily used to fire the boilers at power plants.

IMHO a more serious issue is the fact that the industrialized world has been built, and runs on, petroleum. The easy to get "cheap" petroleum has already been sucked out of the earth. It's a finite resource. There is no practical replacement for it at today's level of global energy consumption.

The planet is over-populated by humans by at least three times what a long term sustainable population would be. The over-population has only been made possible by the use of petroleum-based nitrogen fertilizers and genetic engineering in crops, allowing modern farmers to grow the required food to feed the population.

In short the human race has built a house of cards. And no amount of wind turbines or solar panels is going to prevent what eventually happens to a house of cards.
--
Chris

[Rob Beckers]

Chris, it seems oil and natural gas tend to follow each other in price for most of the time (ie. the ratio between their prices is somewhat fixed). It's only very recently that the two diverged, with the flood of new gas exploits, and that could be temporary. Seen another way, if a BTU from oil is much cheaper vs. a BTU from natural gas, they'll be building oil-fired electrical plants before long. My point really is more in general: Cheap fossil fuels tend to stop the development of renewable sources.

Oil prices have been coming down overall, and I've been told that's because they have new technology that makes it cheap to extract oil from places that it would not be previously. Spawned a whole new oil industry (again) in the US. I'm sure it won't last, just like the last oil boom, but for now and the next years it's a factor.

Agreed on the house-of-cards, with no serious attempt to resolve that...

-RoB-

[Chris Olson]

Cheap fossil fuels tend to stop the development of renewable sources.

Yes Rob, I believe this is right too. The cheap energy from fossil fuels has made life possible, as we know it today. But that has to change. And that change is going to be very expensive. Using wind and solar power is the right thing to do, but it is not new.

Wind power has been used for centuries to grind grain and pump water. Only 80 years ago when my dad was a kid there were about 1.5 million Jacobs and WinCharger turbines across the US and Canada (as well as many other brands). People had lights and even had 32 volt DC appliances. My dad graduated from high school in 1945 and when the REA (Rural Electrification Act) brought grid power to the old home farm where my wife and I live today they would not hook it up to the grid unless my grandpa took down the WinCharger. My grandpa refused to do it.

Joe and Marcellus Jacobs fought the battle until 1958 when they finally ceased production of their Jacobs DC turbines in Minneapolis because there was no longer a market with power lines strung all over tarnation.

In the end, "progress" ended up being a giant step backwards. My grandpa's WinCharger is still in the family, and I have it although the blades rotted off it years ago and it is not running. I intend to restore it and put it back into service this coming winter.

The next two generations are going to have to re-learn everything my grandpa and grandma already knew, and that the present generations consider unfathomable. I've always liked this story about Marcellus Jacobs:

http://www.motherearthnews.com/renewable-energy/wind-power-history-zmaz73ndzraw.aspx

--
Chris