Turbine blade breaks again

A blade has broken yet again on a wind turbine in Sheffield, close to the M1 Link Road. Read more about this at this link to The Telegraph story.

"The uglification of Devon..."

This is a link to a letter from Dave Griffin of Ilfracombe in this week's North Devon Gazette concerning BT's plan to put giant turbines on the hills behind Ilfracombe. As so many of us warned, Fullabrook is likely to be just the beginning...

Something good from the RSPB

There is an interesting article in The Independent today, concerning the worrying reduction in birds such as the cuckoo, which come to Britain in the summer to breed. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) have mounted a joint expedition to Africa, (in regions south of the Sahara) where these birds spend the winter. They hope to learn more about any pressures that the birds face in Africa during the winter months, which could be a reason for their declining numbers.

While we have grave doubts about the RSPB's support of some wind farms, this expedition is praiseworthy.

Britain must go nuclear

Professor David MacKay the government's chief scientific adviser on climate change has said that Britain must go nuclear to cut greenhouse emissions. He says renewable energy sources such as wind and tidal power will never provide more than a fraction of Britain's electricity needs...

Read more about this in this Sunday Times article

Yet more talk of Nimbyism

Farming Today... Charlotte Smith talks about Nimbyism...
Someone called Nick Keeble says that "everyone is in favour of wind power.."

Has he not heard of Professor Jack Steinberger, Professor Dieter Helm, James Lovelock, Professor David Bellamy, former President of France Valery Giscard D'Estaing, Simon Jenkins, just for a start...

And presumably he didn't read Leading Articles in The Times like this one, for example...

He also said something about the fact that you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, totally missing the point that wind farms provide very little benefit in the amount of electricity produced, compared to the large amount of environmental damage and misery that they cause. We are not Nimbys, we are NIAMBYS, which means not in anyone's back yard.

Countryfile

Go to bbc iplayer (Countryfile, about 20 minutes into the programme) to watch John Craven interview Jane and Julian Davis among others about opposition to the wind turbines in the countryside. It was good to hear Jane Davis speak so forcefully about turbine noise, but I found myself annoyed by the programme's focus on the idea (promulgated of course by the Wind Industry and Government representatives like Ed Miliband) that opposition to wind farms is a form of Nimbyism.

One of the best answers to this was in an article by Simon Jenkins, written back in 2003, in regard to the proposal to wind turbines at Whinash. This is an excerpt, and you can read the whole of the article here

"In the calculus of beauty, I would pit the hills of Cumbria, the coast of Devon and Cornwall, the Pennine uplands and the mountains of Wales against any Constable, Gainsborough or Stubbs. They are no less fragile, and currently far more vulnerable. I would not burn a Constable if I were told it might help to save fossil fuel, if only because the benefit would be vastly outweighed by the loss. Nor would I sacrifice the landscapes that Ms Hewitt plans to destroy for so trivial a donation to the cause of global cooling as a few hundred wind turbines.

The Government's thesis that the countryside of upland and coastal Britain is "worth sacrificing to save the planet" is an insult to science, economics and politics. But the greatest insult is to aesthetics. The trouble is that aesthetics has no way of answering back. "

Well, on the artistsagainstwindfarms website, we have done our best to make our answer.. but the other scientific, economic and political arguments are just as powerful, and the Countryfile programme could have given them more weight as well.

Not so "green" after all

From the Wall Street Journal.... China's ambition of powering "green cities" with huge wind farms sin't as green as it appears to be... many new coal-fired power plants will be needed as back up for the times when the wind doesn't blow. Read more about this here.