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As I was riding along the High Peak Trail in Derbyshire this afternoon I couldn't help snapping this view while thinking "I wonder if anyone moaned when the original stone windmill was built here?"
Not a particularly spectacular shot but thought provoking.
Thought provoking indeed, for at the moment there is a huge debate raging in Australia as the government has just cut funding for renewable energy.
And given permission for the Chinese to mine coal on prime agricultural land.
In my area which is the lowest wind area in Northern Europe but seems fair game for wind farm developers NIMBY stands for "Next it might be you'!
So watch out!
Thought provoking indeed, for at the moment there is a huge debate raging in Australia as the government has just cut funding for renewable energy.
And given permission for the Chinese to mine coal on prime agricultural land.
You haven't been importing MPs from here, have you?
As I was riding along the High Peak Trail in Derbyshire this afternoon I couldn't help snapping this view while thinking "I wonder if anyone moaned when the original stone windmill was built here?"
Not a particularly spectacular shot but thought provoking.
East Anglia used to be seething with windmills: grinding corn, pumping water from fens, and probably more uses I 've forgotten. No-one complains about old windmills, only new ones. At least you can remove modern windmills and the ground is returned to what it was. Not so with solar farms. Again prime agricultural land and areas of natural beauty are disappearing under acres of shiny black panels. They ruin the land. The run-off is utterly changed; and the solar farm firms aim to graze sheep under them - sheep ruin the land. They crop all the plants to almost nothing, then the soil suffers wind and run-off erosion. 25 years of sheep grazing, and you have a whole lot of brown field sites, good for nothing. What a wonderful plan. And the farmers and solar panel installers (plus Chinese makers) will have loads of money in the bank - at the expense of our taxpayers. Even better, eh? What the Hell are we going to leave for our children and grandchildren?
It's sometimes easy to forget that things which we today regard as old-fashioned, traditional and picturesquely quaint were probably once considered to be grotesque, new-fangled monstrosities.
John
"A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there � even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity." ~ Robert Doisneau
East Anglia used to be seething with windmills: grinding corn, pumping water from fens, and probably more uses I 've forgotten. No-one complains about old windmills, only new ones. At least you can remove modern windmills and the ground is returned to what it was. Not so with solar farms. Again prime agricultural land and areas of natural beauty are disappearing under acres of shiny black panels. They ruin the land. The run-off is utterly changed; and the solar farm firms aim to graze sheep under them - sheep ruin the land. They crop all the plants to almost nothing, then the soil suffers wind and run-off erosion. 25 years of sheep grazing, and you have a whole lot of brown field sites, good for nothing. What a wonderful plan. And the farmers and solar panel installers (plus Chinese makers) will have loads of money in the bank - at the expense of our taxpayers. Even better, eh? What the Hell are we going to leave for our children and grandchildren?
The one thing that no one wants to tell us about solar panels is how much they ADD to global warming. Because each panel absorbs 1KW of sunlight energy for every 100W it produces, the rest is re-radiated as heat. By covering the planet with acres of black panels we will change the earths albedo increasing the amount of energy absorbed from the sun and fuelling global warming rather than reducing it. If solar energy is going to do any good it needs to be arrays of mirrors putting their energy into a steam generator (which should be rather more efficient too.)
Ralph, if the panels gets close to black body they should absorb perfectly, but that's ideal and clearly they're good emitters of long wave. One way would be to add a heat exchanger system to dump the thermal gain. Why hasn't anyone turned their attention to this? Agree with you regarding reflected light, as used in the desert, but it needs good quality sun light for that, not the overcast sky conditions here in the UK. Geothermal if you can afford it, and if you have the real estate!
The obvious way to go here is tidal power; but that doesn't fit the 'fast buck' mentality of our bigwigs and politicians. They'd rather import cheap technology from China and make loads of dosh from instant profits - from taxpayers' money.
I always liked the high altitude wind turbine idea - basically a turbine enclosed within a giant toroidal helium balloon with the tethering wires also acting as power cabkes. The only problem around here is all the pesky aeroplanes getting in the way. But again, not what pays a good return for the government right now, or the people selling them can't afford the right bungs to the right people.
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