Europe's Biggest Wind Farm Breaks Ground Near Glascow - 140 Units,

[hatrack]

Construction on Europe's biggest onshore wind farm began yesterday as Britain stepped up efforts to obtain more energy from renewable sources. The £300m Scottish Power site at Whitelee, south of Glasgow, will have 140 turbines and eventuaklly provide enough electricity to power 200,000 homes.

Alistair Darling, the secretary of state for trade and industry, said the wind farm - which will come on stream in three years - would make a big contribution to securing the UK's energy supplies and tackling climate change.

"Within three years, 140 turbines will rise above Eaglesham Moor, harnessing enough wind energy to power 200,000 homes - that's most of Glasgow," Mr Darling said. Sixteen percent of Scotland's electricity already comes from renewable sources, compared to 4% for the UK as a whole, and Whitelee will save a further 250,000 tonnes of harmful carbon dioxide emissions every year.

The government is stepping up its efforts on wind energy because other renewable sources of energy are not far enough developed. Britain's 130 wind farms provide electricity for 1m homes, and 217 turbines are being built to provide 431 megawatts of electricity. By contrast, an average nuclear power station generates between 500 and 600 megawatts.

EDIT

http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1891846,00.html

[OnyxCollie]

1. Who thought to put "break" and "wind" in the same headline?

Pretty impressive. Don't those things screw up migratory bird patterns?

[madmax]

2. I thought the US had the biggest wind farm

DC... no? I'm shocked!! :evilgrin:

[NNadir]

3. The usual confusion between power and energy.

This article, in noting that the entire wind capacity of Britain does not equal one (small) nuclear power plant attempts to obscure nonetheless the basic reality by representing that the cases are somehow equivalent. They are not. Wind plants are considered to be doing well if they operate 25% of the time. Nuclear power plants are considered poor performers if they operate less than 80% of the time.

One of the reasons that we are dying waiting for the renewable Godot is that our media plays into the scientifically illiterate game of confusing power and energy:

The government is stepping up its efforts on wind energy because other renewable sources of energy are not far enough developed. Britain's 130 wind farms provide electricity for 1m homes, and 217 turbines are being built to provide 431 megawatts of electricity. By contrast, an average nuclear power station generates between 500 and 600 megawatts.

For the record, wind cannot compete with nuclear energy anywhere on earth, since nuclear is a continuous base load form of energy and wind is available only some of the time. In fact wind only can serve to reduce gas consumption, and then only when spinning reserves are met and the wind has been reasonably forecast.

Thus the number of nuclear power plants around the world that have been replaced by wind power is zero. In fact the number of power plants of any type that have been replaced by wind power is zero, since many, if not all existing power plants, are needed as back up. Wind's advantage consists solely of the capability to reduce the utilization of these plants, but no one ever has demolished a power plant because there's plenty of windmills nearby. In cases where no hydroelectric capacity is available, and wind forecasts are uncertain, often power companies can't even shut their fossil capacity down, because they are needed as spinning reserve, where "spinning reserve" is defined as power that can replace a trip within 30 minutes. (The 2003 blackout in the Northeast was partially the result of insufficient spinning reserves.)

Another factual misrepresentation in this article concerns the scale of nuclear power plants. Most of the new nuclear power plants being built around the world are not 500 to 600 MWe. Most are two to three times as large as that.