Shale Gas

A good article by David Rose in the Daily Mail here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-2053686/UK-shale-gas-Coal-industry-tatters-gas-running-alternative.html?ITO=1490

This is a quote from the article, about a shale gas plant costing £500 million, at Hoo St Werburgh in Kent, that will produce 1000MW, enough to power a quarter of the homes in London. It is compared to the 217 turbines of the London Array, the world's biggest offshore wind farm.

"Covering 90 square miles, this too will have the capacity to generate 1GW (one billion watts). The turbines’ construction has been priced at £2 billion, four times as much as the Kentish gas plant, although this does not include the cost – perhaps a further £500 million – of connecting them to the National Grid, via 300 miles of undersea high-voltage cables.

Without the labyrinthine system of ‘green’ taxes and Government subsidies known as the Renewables Obligation, which is already adding an estimated £100 to the cost of every British household’s electricity bill, and an average 20 per cent to the charges paid by businesses, the wind farm could never be built, because it would be hopelessly uneconomic.

As well as being more expensive, the turbines will not last nearly as long: about 20 years, half the time of the gas-fired power station. A gas plant, moreover, will produce electricity 24 hours day; the turbines won’t. British windmills can be expected to generate power only 27 per cent of the time. That figure falls to just ten per cent in the calm conditions of a bitter Arctic high, such as that which covered the entire UK, causing record low temperatures, for several weeks last December."

Christopher Booker in The Daily Mail

Why the £250bn wind power industry could be the greatest scam of our age - and here are the three 'lies' that prove it

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1361316/250bn-wind-power-industry-greatest-scam-age.html#ixzz1FHjjEzEh

"Killing Chinese people"

We were sent a link to this blog by a supporter in Yorkshire...

The text in green below is a quote:

"The Great Green Hope, power from garden ornaments, turns out to be more polluting than those coal fired power stations they keep trying to sabotage. Of course, that's okay because they aren't polluting here."

Read more on the blog: http://underdogsbiteupwards.blogspot.com/2011/01/goodbye-ecosystem-hello-foe.html

This links to a Daily Mail article as well, about the mining of rare earths in China - we linked to it ourselves previously.

We would like to add a reminder too of the fact that in China some years ago, when some villagers protested against a wind power station, the police opened fire on them and several protesters were killed. Had they been protesting against a nuclear or coal powered power station, there would have been a world-wide uproar, of course.

"Pollution - the true cost of Britain's wind power experiment"

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html