Plan For World's Largest Wind Farm

ClockworkPlanet writes: "A Hebridean island (North of Scotland) is set to become the global capital of renewable energy with advanced plans for the world's largest onshore wind farm acting as a catalyst to attract wave and tidal power stations. This article spills the juice."

Comments

Still playing Catch-Up with the Continent

[Cy Guy]

• The government is working towards providing 10% of Britain's electricity supplies from renewable sources by 2010; at present, they provide 2.8%.
• Britain is Europe's windiest country but has only 880 operating wind turbines, based on 61 wind farms. They produce less than 1% of the country's needs. World leader Denmark gets 15% of its power that way.

So in nine more years they'll only be at two-thirds the level of where Denmark is today. Hardly sounds like a groundbreaking achievement.

I wish the article would talk about the technology used in the cable itself as that seems to be the big breakthough that will enable this project. Will it use superconducting technology such as is already being tested in the US and in Denmark? If we can produce 350 mile long undersea cables, then maybe we could harness heat from undersea thermal vents to generate electricity? or perhaps the thermal mass of the great sargassos sea? Or put Oil and Gas fired plants on current offshore drilling platforms so the energy is being transported not the oil and we won't have to worry about another Exxon Valdez disaster.

Eliminate nuclear? Who are they kidding?

[Spamalamadingdong]

Said the article:

If planning permission is granted Britain will more than double its renewable energy capacity. Environmental campaigners say a new generation of nuclear power stations may not then need to be built.

Why not eliminate an older generation of coal-fired plants instead, and eliminate their carbon emissions? Wind cannot replace nuclear by itself, because there is no cheap way to store wind power. There will remain a need for constant supplies of power to feed the base load, and that power will have to come from some kind of energy store such as fossil fuel or nuclear. The only one of these which doesn't emit CO2 is, of course, nuclear. Given the concern over global warming I am amazed that elimination of nuclear power is still a Green priority; it is vastly easier to sequester a few thousand tons of spent fuel every year than billions of tons of diffuse gas.

More Open Space

[n-baxley]

The biggest complaints about wind power seems to be the unsightly appearance of the towers dotting the landscape. Well, why are there not more wind farms in remote places? There are certainly many "remote place" around the world. Is the cost of transporting that power to the places it's needed just too great for this, or is the cost of producing power from wind too great in and of itself? It seems solar power might be simpler since there are no moving parts like a wind turbine. I'm pretty uneducated about this type of thing. What's the general concensus?