Letter: Windfarms are taking over my countryside
Tuesday 5th July 2011, 6:00AM BST.
Letter: Allan Tucker of Oswestry, states “windfarms are not taking over our countryside”.
He is quite right. . . because he lives in Shropshire, where there is not a single wind turbine!
However, I am a proud Welshman and wind turbines are most certainly taking over MY countryside in Wales… in their thousands. . . to supply his country, around Manchester with sporadic electricity.
If he wants wind turbines to serve England. . . then put them in Shropshire. What a cheek to support wind turbines in Wales, when he lives in England.
Like most pro-wind energy fanatics, Allan Tucker is completely innumerate. He says that “wind energy supplied a day’s electricity for three million homes in 2010.”
Big deal! That is only a year’s electricity for a paltry 8,219 homes, Mr Tucker.
The truth is the thousands of turbines in the UK saved very little fossil fuels or CO2 emissions in 2010, simply because the back-up fossil fuel power stations are never switched off, due to the unpredictable, highly erratic nature of the wind.
Wind turbines frequently duplicate fossil fuel electricity output. CO2 savings from wind energy are as paltry as they are, are grossly exaggerated!
L J Jenkins
Gwbert
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It’s about time we got something back out of Wales.
Ever since they stopped mining coal and all went on incapacity benefit they have been nothing but a drag on the English economy.
So, basically, if you want to keep getting your handouts from us English then we expect you to keep housing our turbines and like it!
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Couldn’t agree more!
I’ve had numerous conversations with Welsh Nationalist bleating on about independence etc etc except they can’t answer the 1 fundamental question…..How?
What they don’t realise is that without funding from the English tax payer, the tumble weed would be rolling through!
I would dearly love to hear how they would form an autonomous economy!
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Surprised that Shropshire Star are happy to publish such openly racist comments.
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Surely a candidate for the most idiotic and ill conceived post ever seen on the Star website? And let’s face it, it’s up against some tough competition…
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You have a point, everyone’s complaining about “handouts” to immigrants, but at least they’re working. Wales is purely farming. Not a lot else.
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Complaining about wind turbines and power lines taking over the countryside is rather like complaining about roads littering the place: they are the veins and arteries of our civilisation. As a boy I lived on an island covered in small wind turbines, which had superseded donkeys as the main source of pumping power; they were replaced by pylons, which doubtless will be replaced by turbines in good time. It’s called ‘progress’.
As for the aguments about wind power being uneconomic or intermittent, it’s a matter of scale: we simply need to build tens of thousands of them. I’d happily see one on Lilleshall Hill.
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You are quite wrong about wind turbines becoming economic or more reliable with scale. The truth is exactly the opposite – in fact the issue with wind turbines becomes worse and worse the more of them that are built and attached to the national grid. The more you build – the more power stations you also have to build as backup. Also – the greater number of turbines – the greater the amount of power fluctuations that happen, meaning that the electricity generated is no longer used – but then we all have to pay the turbine owner to stop them producing. This is on top of the millions of pounds paid to the turbine owners in subsidies and what they also get in tax breaks.
Wind energy is the new double glazing. The money they generate is far in excess of any benefit they provide (and it is dubious that they provide any benefit whatsoever). Then – no matter whether they are producing much electricity or not you also have to build huge substations and pylons to take away any electricity that is generated. Wind turbines are an economic nightmare. They are an ecological nightmare and this gets worse the more of them that get built. Anybody who is for large scale wind turbine development is either badly informed or taking huge amounts of money away from the taxpayer.
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Oh dear, another windy nimby that seems to think that conventional power stations run 24/7, well the reality is that they don’t – due to maintenance, and breakdowns and nuclear power can go off line in an instance caused major problems, as I write one of the four reactors at Wylfa is offline and there is no date yet for it to be operational again, lets not forget that the whole plant was non operational for almost 12 months a few years ago, due to safety concerns and uranium is a finite resource as are all fossil fuels. Wind power, along with wave, tidal and solar….Bring it on !
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Every stop saying about how we need backups for wind. Are you forgetting the production of wave tidal and in some aspects solar? we have great potential for Wave and tidal in particular
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