Windfarms? We might as well use hamsters on treadmills.

 

1. PETA wouldn’t stand for hamster abuse.  Third world children maybe, but no hamsters.

   Posted by grayjohn       09/06/2009  at  08:39 AM  



2. I wish the econuts would learn some basic math… as well as a bit of healthy skepticism. These big wind turbines are a joke. They’re quoted output is usually given in a 20mph wind… but the energy in the wind is proportional to the square of the wind speed. So your turbine only provides 1/4 of it’s rated output at 10mph. Even taking them at the rated power, say 2.5mW for a 300 foot monster, you’d need 500 to replace the typical power plant. You can’t put turbines that size right on top of each other… so the land cost is ridiculous. Another marketing ploy is their claim of how many homes a windmill can power… as if the electricity coming thru the meter is the only energy used by the home. Add in the household’s share of all the businesses from agriculture to manufacturing that go into supporting the them, and that number will fall drastically.

   I once calculated that to power my home state of Michigan with windmills, would take 9000 of them, covering about 18% of the total land area of the state. I can see that going over. One lighthouse might be a picturesque tourist attraction… but one every mile would get tiresome.

   Posted by JimS       09/06/2009  at  08:49 AM  



3. About the light bulb ban…

   The man responsible for the ban,
   EU Energy Commisioner Piebalgs,
   is now responding to protests,
   defending his ban on his blog
   by saying it “increases choice"….

   Ah, that makes it alright then!

   See his blog entry
   http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/piebalgs/lighting-the-way-to-the-future/
   and comments…

   More about the strange - and unpublicized - EU and industrial politics that led to the ban:
   http://www.ceolas.net/#li1ax
   .

   Posted by peterdub       09/06/2009  at  02:53 PM  



4. Don’t worry, the windmill craze won’t last long.  Once the Animal rights people see how many birds are killed, and the ‘safety-at-all-costs’ types have the evidence of a few catastrophic blade failures where a 100 foot edged weapon comes flying through a few homes at 100+ mph, then we will be down to the energy we can make with treadmills & stationary bicycles.

   Posted by Siddhartha Vicious       09/08/2009  at  05:01 PM  



5. treadmills & stationary bicycles

   Sid, funny you should mention that.
   Last week there was some sort of gathering by the gween idiots many protesting climate change etc.  Well, there they were (a few) on a stationary bike working in shifts to generate electricity.  The paper din’t report on how successful or not it was but I’d guess not much. These are folks with no job (mostly) and a drive to belong to something so lonely must be their life.

   Posted by peiper       09/09/2009  at  06:41 AM  

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