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UK Wants Huge Expansion In Offshore Wind Power
OriginalArlen writes "The UK government has announced an ambitious plan to expand the existing offshore wind turbine farms, which are already extensive, to an estimated 7,000 units — two per mile of coastline — enough to generate 20% of the UK's power needs by 2020. The newly green-friendly Conservative opposition party is also backing the scheme. Wonder what they'll make of it in Oregon..."
Power comes from Migor and the awesome hyper-nuclear reactors aboard Migor's mighty space ship.
They create your puny "WIND"
Migor will EAT YOUR SOUL
France does it quite well. In fact they're a net energy exporter.
Now they offshore our IT jobs to the fricken wind!
Table-ized A.I.
Wonder what they'll make of it in Oregon..."
The situation in Oregon called for the implementation of buoy-like devices to harness wave motion into power. Great Britain is talking about placing windmills offshore. The power generation and science in general is different. The politics of it may be the same though. I'm not qualified to speak about Brit NIMBY's (or I guess NOMSL-not on my shore line), Brit fisherman, or Brit energy lobbyists, as I am an American. I imagine there would be some resistance here, but I not familiar with the situation. On the other hand, wind is a proven tech so who knows. It really just comes down to how powerful the lobbying against this is, as it looks technically feasible and sufficiently beneficial.
I got a catholic block.
The British are cigarettes? Seriously, old boy, I'm from MISSOURI , and I know that slang means different things across the pond. If you don't catch up with the times, people are going to think you're one of those extremely unintelligent trolls. Oh, the shaminess of it all.
I'm waiting for a "-1 somepeoplejustshouldn'tgetmodprivileges" meta-moderation.
for reasons I don't exactly recall - but apparently it's one of the drawbacks to windmill farms...
Good thing for the UK Teddy Kennedy doesn't own coastal property there. They'd be screwed.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Let me get this straight. In order to save the climate, we're going to switch from CO2 producing internal combustion engines to something that directly sucks the energy right out of the sky. Has anyone even bothered to computer model the atmosphere when you start extracting gigawatts and then terrawatts from it? If you stop to realize that in western nations, people actually consume more energy than the solar flux of their entire country (which is why you don't see solar powered cars), then, the thought of getting all of our energy from wind power seems to create a gaping energy deficit in the very climate itself. When the dust all settles, we'll probably be in some sort of windmill induced ice age, or, there will be no more rain.
This is my sig.
I may not be an electrician but I do know that water and electricity don't mix and you can't effectively/safely beam the power in wirelessly so you gotta run a biiiiig cord with a lotttt of amps running through it through the ocean. Btw saltwater conducts better than normal water lol. I don't even want to know what would happen if a line like that fully shorted out. I'm thinking the electrolysis would cause enough hydrogen to be split off that the heat could ignite it and cause a small explosion. How do I know? I've seen small scale electrical shorts blow test tubes up during electrolysis experiments. It wasn't pretty...pretty cool but not pretty.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
The goal is to please environmentalists. And environmentalists hate nukes with a passion which makes an uncontrolled fission reaction look like a popcorn kettle.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
At least the windmills will keep the beaches cool in summer...
(*) It will be fought by entrenched fishing interests
(FWIW it is my firm belief that this phrase should become the next Slashdot meme.)
The only way I can view us solve the energy crisis and its effects is:
/. saying we should only use nuclear because other ways can't meet the "base load". Funny how scientists can sometime ignore simple principle like "do not put all your eggs in the same basket".
1) Phase out coal and fossil thermal plant. Fossil fuel will be reserved for things like airplanes or other moving equipment because of its high energy density (13 KWh/kg for gasoline compared to 0.14 KWh/kg for flywheels and 0.04 KWh/kg for batteries). It will slowly become obvious that it is silly to use fossil fuel for stationary equipment like power plants.
2) Use existing hydro infrastructure
3) Use wind
4) Use solar
5) Use nuclear
6) Etc..
In short, let's not put all our eggs in the same basket. This way if one way to get energy fails, we still have alternatives. Let's not pretend we are infallible and that we will get it right the first time with a single approach.
I have problems with a recent article on
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
When you're next door to Italy, of course you're going to be a net exporter! Who are they going to rely on to generate their power? Themselves
In case you're not familiar with power sources, for baseload power, you're generally going to be using hydro, nuclear, or coal. They're sources whose fuel is cheap and whose plants lend themselves to larger outputs. To cover infrequent peaks of demand, one frequently maintains reserve capacity in the form of gas turbines or, less common and more expensively, oil or gas-fired power plants. Reserve capacity has a low purchase price (or is leftover from decades with more favorable fuel prices, in the case of oil and gas-fired plants) and a high operating cost
Italy--in goddamn 2007--maintains oil-fired baseload capacity. That's right, the stuff an American power company won't touch unless a market's gas lines happened to be cut on the same day their whirly gigs won't start up. Just like the rest of the West did up until the first Oil Crisis in the 1970's.
So, while France's impressive system for licensing and standardizing plants, along with their active R&D in the industry, might be laudable, that surplus is there to profit from flaws in their neighbors' own energy policies.
Since I submitted the story on Sunday, they've actually made the announcement (on Sunday, it was just being heavily trailed in the press.)
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
No, it won't. The North Sea is pretty much fished out, and a combination of "no fish" and draconian quota restrictions brought in to try to help the remainder to recover has lead to there being very few commercial fishing fleet left in the UK. The remaining couple of dozen of inshore trawlers don't exactly have the government in their back pockets.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
Drawback? Anyone who has seen Alfred Hitchcock's prophetic masterpiece - The Birds - will back me in saying "Forget renewable energy, this is its main selling point"
...should I have gone with "It's not a bird, it's a feature"?
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
There is already an undersea cable carrying significant power between France & GB. AFAIK, it uses DC transmission not AC.
I would guess that this might be the solution for the farms in the north sea. Send it ashore in DC form and then turn it into AC and synchronize it with the Grid onshore. Sort of much like the existing gas(natural not petroleum) transmission networks.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
It's not really a troll as it does have some truth to it. Moding it troll really was just a waste of mod points it doesn't change the truth. I know than in my State of California no Wind turbines of any importance or Nuclear facility could be built without in a lawsuit/lawsuits from environmentalists blocking it for years first. So none will be built. Why would anyone put themselves through the hassle and expense? The same goes for taping off shore oil and natural gas, it's there and in large amounts, no one is allowed to access it by federal regulations insisted on by the environmentalists. We import oil and gas from people who hate us instead.
You're mixing windmills up with fans. Fans use power to strengthen wind. Windmills weaken wind to create power.
Denmark's Horns Rev wind farm, which I believe is the world's largest offshore wind farm, was built in 2002. They had incredible maintenance issues with the turbines and electronics, due to the harsh environment with salt water. In fact, they cite 75,000 maintenance trips -- each requiring an engineer to be lowered down from a helicopter onto a turbine's nacelle platform -- in the first 1.5 years of operation. That's a lot for 80 wind turbines. And that was very expensive. Hope they get this right in the UK.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
The whole "kills lots of birds" things came about because of some very early, very dense wind farms that weren't planned out very well and had smaller, very high-speed blade systems.
Newer wind turbine systems are larger, slower, better-designed, and more care is usually given to layout of a wind farm so that, while SOME birds are occasionally killed, the numbers are greatly reduced.
Do some Google searches for "altamont pass" and "wind turbines kill birds".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
How much political or public sway to the "entrenched fishing interests" have?
Three fifths of bugger all I'd expect.
In the long run a large area which is never fished will probably have a rather positive effect on fish "restocking" levels.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Can't find an answer to what seems to be the real question. After they get through building this thing, these 8,000 turbines, and after we take account of total running costs in terms of fuel, how much fuel is going to be saved? It only works, right, if they burn less afterwards than before, and this has to include trips out to service them, maintenance crews on the transmission lines and shore based units, the whole current energy budget.
So what's the answer? Now we are using X tons or btus of oil, coal, gas or whatever to generate a given megawattage. Then we will be using Y and still get the same megawattage.
I suspect there is no answer to be found, because it will turn out Y is actually larger than X. You may feel a whole lot better and get a warm national glow from 'going green', but the reality will not be energy saving. OK, this could be wrong, but then lets see the numbers.
And those who understand Logic understand that we've been putting up really big buildings that absorb a lot more wind energy than a windmill for millenia now and we have yet to make all the Earth's atmosphere shoot out into space.
then the upside is that there will be plenty of bird-slurry food to help fish populations increase.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
They will most likely do stationary trubines in shallow water. Why not combine the pole with a bouy around it that generates wave power as well? I would think that the cost to do it is minimal.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I mean, it kills the dumb birds, hopefully before they reproduce. Eventually, you get a new species of high IQ birds who instinctly know that it's not a good thing to fly into a rotating wind turbine. ahahaha...
The opposition in the UK will come, not from locals, but weekending Londoners and expat American actors who will object to everything that spoils their view of the rest of the UK as their weekend playground. They will oppose the substations where power comes on shore (they've already done that in the Thames estuary), and, because they are lousy sailors, they will oppose anything that they might bump into while cruising drunk.
And they will demand first access to food and power when the crunch comes. Welcome to a country of 60 million people entirely controlled by the inhabitants of one Southern city.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
This concept of "Base Load" gets bantied about, in (often) confusing and erroneous ways.
An electrical energy system has two values that are critical in preserving the integrity of the system.
1) "Base load" - the minimum amount of load the system can expect at any time. In short, there's *always* going to be this much or more energy produced at any given time. If you overproduce Base load you have rising voltages in the system and potentially cause problems. Though, this is rarely a problem - if there was too much capacity at any time, they could offset the phase of a generator or two, causing one system to effectively cancel out the other, reducing system voltage.
2) "Max load" - the maximum amount of load the system could generate at any time. If your usage exceeds max load, you have rolling brownouts or even blackouts.
Usually, the "Base load" is handled by slower-moving-but cheap power plants. A coal-fired plant can take an hour or more to change its output significantly, but it can produce electricity 24x7 at the cheapest possible cost. Thus it's a good candidate for "Base Load". But whatever solution is applied to base load, it must be very, very dependable.
However, the difference between Base load and Max load can be quite variable, changing significantly in mere minutes. This "Variable load" must be met in order to prevent voltage spikes and/or brownouts, and to handle this, you need power plants that can vary their output quickly, and on demand.
Notice that neither Wind or Solar energy can actually act as either Base or Variable loads. Yes, they add energy to the sytem, but they can't be considered "Base load" since their output varies. And they can't really be considered "Variable load" because their output varies with their wind-energy input, NOT because their output varies upon demand.
Thus, Wind/Solar can't really be used as EITHER base or "Variable" load. ALL of the output of either Solar or Wind energy must be matched by other variable load sources, so that when the wind isn't blowing and/or the sun not shining, the system as a whole can preserve its integrity. And this is the part that nobody discusses.
YES, you can get energy from the wind, or from solar panels. But it isn't reliable, so can't be used for "Base load", but it also isn't available "on demand" so it isn't useful for "Variable load".
Which brings me to my point: what if they used the wind energy to compress air that's otherwise stored on the ocean floor? All that nice, heavy water would avoid the need for high-pressure tanks, simply pushing the water out of the way would provide significant amounts of energy. And it would be useful for either base or variable loads, since the compressed air could be used to power generators on demand. Oh, and piping compressed air is a fairly lossless ordeal.
Why not?
Why not?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
UK Demand 2007 = 358 TWh
.003376295 TWh in a year, about half a V80. So increasing the efficiency of all wind turbines to average a V80 would be an accomplishment.
Estimated UK Demand 2020 = 381 TWh
Increase in demand = 23 TWh
Vesta V80 2MW wind turbine will make about 0.006666666 TWh in a year. V80's are used at North Hoyle Offshore Wind Farm.
3451 Vesta V80 will be required to meet the increase in demand.
This does not cover the loss of some coal-fired power stations after 2015.
Currently, there are 155 wind farm projects in the UK, with 1,900 turbines making around 6.4 TWh. The average makes around
57151 Vesta V80 would be required to make the 381 TWh in 2020. Over 7 wind turbines each mile of coastline.
All errors above were possibly intentional.
You're the one who is lame, and those who understand physics are exactly those who modded the parent to your post as troll.
All this is crap: wind turbines cost a lot to produce, need a lot of copper which production is very poluting and the amount of energy produced is always bellow estimations. The only purpose of wind turbine farms is to get subventions and fiscal advantages, there is no ecological justification and once this will become obvious to everybody, the subventions and fiscal advantages will disapear and we will stop this nonsense.
Sigh. I would have thought my quip about memes would have tipped off the mods and potential repliers. My original post was a reference to this post, which itself was a refernce to this joke, both of which are meant to be funny, not serious.
And what'd be the power trasmission medium? Copper cables?
Ah ah ah ah!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Reduce, reuse, cycle
No, Its 20% of HOMES, not 20% of entire power usage - I'm not sure if thats how it was intended but I certainly read it as not including industry and the like (which is still gonna be a huge amount).
Those who understand Physics or Chemistry understand that energy is never created in a system, it can only be transferred to it.
Indeed. Good job we orbit a giant nuclear reactor that is constantly putting energy into our non-closed system here on Earth.
yes, but you did it wrong
Any idea if these windmills have an adverse effect on ocean dwelling creatures or can they happily swim around them without trouble?
I'm just intrigued by the idea that whilst providing power, they may also provide protection to allow fish stocks to recover in the waters around them where trawlers will struggle to fish.
Of course, I hear these things are quite bad for birds instead however so it's still not entirely harmless I guess.
Same goes for members of the EU telling us about ours.
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
If you have enough solar & wind power generators over a large and diversified area, and grid all of that up, let's say the whole EU, the whole US, or similar, the sun ought to be shining somewhere, and the wind ought to be blowing somehere at anytime.
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
Looks like now UK wants to offshore even simple act of farting also to India. Oh wait, it's not about *that* wind power.
insensitive clod
-1 not first post
I really hope this happens. I'd be dead proud to see it happen. Renewable/sustainable energy is something that needs to be addressed pretty bloody quickly all over the world, not just in the UK.
:D), but have held back because they wouldn't have the first clue on how to run the country properly. I'm happy to finally see the people who are actually in power do something that the Green party would have done, hurray!
I've always wanted to vote Green (when I've been living somewhere big enough to have the chance to
"I hate Cthulhu, Cthulhu hates me, I kill his cultists, He eats worlds for tea"
ITYM "the thugs in the scallop industry" for "entrenched fishing interests"
/* FUCK - The F-word is here so that you can grep for it */
Spain is the world's third biggest producer of wind power so they'd be more likely to sell to France.
No sig today...
In Australia fags mean cigaretts too
Oh and dont feed the trolls, didn't you get the warning sign?
Make SELinux enforcing again!
This isn't quite accurate. In many industrialized parts of the world, the annual peak load is during sunny periods. Think: Arizona. Why is the peak load during sunny periods? Air conditioning. When do solar cells produce the most electricity? During sunny periods. Correlation can be used to allow intermittent power to be considered "base". Is it possible that there'd be a peak on a cloudy day in Arizona, or at night? I guess. It's also possible that all the coal power plants will have to come down for emergency service at the same time.
Correlation can also be used to allow wind to be base load, under at least two scenarios: In the first, if you had two wind turbines spread geographically in such a way that they were highly negatively correlated -- that is, if one was spinning, the other wasn't -- then you could count one of the two as base load, since one of the two will always spin. You won't be able to get two turbines with a coefficient of -1.0, but you might be able to find a series of turbines in which they were always generating some power, and you could count that as base. The other way to count wind turbines as base is to use a second source of power [say, natural gas, wood chips, landfill gas with a storage tank, etc] and force them to have a correlation of -1.0 by varying the output of the second source of power perfectly negatively with the wind, thereby guaranteeing a minimum output between the two systems.
Are any of these methods applicable just anywhere? Nope. But, there's plenty of room for solar installations in the Southwest US to count as base [and as an added bonus they're distributed, so massive failure is far less likely], and some wind can be used as base load anywhere if there's enough negative correlation in wind or using a second type of power plant.
All of this ignores the very real opportunity to use technology to shift peak. Give people instant feedback on the supply-demand curves [ie change price] and watch as they shift their usage off peak -- thinks like running the dishwasher or clothes washer/dryer will start happening later in the evening, helping to smooth the peak thereby making intermittent power sources like wind and solar less difficult to incorporate into the supply grid.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
You haven't been round the spam-fighting community much, have you... I have to tell you that those are only half-joking. Your objection is one I've seen before (eg on the Oregon tidal system story) so I thought it worth pointing out that fishing interests are really not a problem over here.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
They use their clout to pressure people to use less energy by making energy harder to get. Since the USA consumes twice the energy per person as Britain (The second largest consumer) I'd say they were on the right track. We can get by with less, and we should. If we halved our oil usage, we could nearly be self sufficient! We could tell the Middle East to go fuck off and work on re-newable sources to use in place of oil.
It's a bit dickish, but so are the religionists when they try to get their wacky fairytale rules into secular law. But, they do have a bit of a point.
Blar.
Fuck the fishermen. They're a bunch of nasty, greedy idiots. These dumb bastards have been bleating for years about the fishing quotas that have been put in place to protect what little we have left, claiming they're overly stringent and are threatening their livelihoods, but don't seem to have considered that nothing will threaten their livelihood quite like there not being any fish. And sure as hell they'd wipe them out overnight if we let them.
Interestingly, they've changed tack this year. Knowing that nobody can really argue otherwise, they're claiming that North Sea cod stocks have bounced right back since the last round of restrictions, and the fish are abundant. Now, let's think, why would they say that?
Frankly, if windmills stop these goons raping the sea any further, I'm all for it.
want to put tons of expensive equipment in such a corrosive, hostile environment as the ocean?-}
unless, of course,the price of fossil fuel (however that's determined) makes it logical...
As an Englishman (non resident), I'm very pleased to hear this.
A completely idiotoc government in the 70s decided they colud lower taxes ang gain votes if they sold off basically ALL of the north sea oil and gas to foreign interests. They then shut down pretty much all of the coal mines. Clearly, strategic thought was beyond them.
No we're at the far end of the Russian gas pipeline and its basically a very large stick they can use to jerk us around diplomatically.
Getting a large proportion of energy locally would be good of independence. Finally, the UK is a relatively good candidate for the long-term introduction of rechargable hyprids due to it's small size and the general shortness of journeys. That would further reduce dependence on foreign interests, require slow infrastructure changes (hybrids can run on still widely availavle petrol) but require plentiful, locally obtained electricity.
Now all we need are national grid sized storage batteries.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Instead of consuming more (power/electricity) why not consume less? Ditch the CRT for flat panels, ride a bike or hell even walk to the shop?
I wish I was clever!
FANTASTIC!
Get back to me when you realize that's not what we're discussing here and you're not smart enough to realize it.
Have you ever seen what happens if you connect a synchronus machine (generator) to the hypothetical infinite bus bar out of phase?
BOING!
That's OK for a 10Kg demo machine, byt a 10,000Kg generator?
Also, it doesn't solve the problem, you'll simply end up dissipating the power in the out-of-phase machine, which will get rather hot.
You have to reduce the power in, ie dissipate any excess locally at the powerstation with the excess, or draw more power out (eg pupming stations (not really in the UK) or giant storage batteries (not with current tech)).
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Alberta is experimenting with it too but wind has some incredible drawbacks fitting in to exisiting power systems, namely how it can start up all of a sudden from a state of no wind, and then just as quickly drop off again, when energy coordinators had expected it to continue. This leads to massive headaches and expensive problems for regulatory agencies wanting to avoid brown-outs and black-outs. It is actually wind's most serious problem and a huge reason to keep wind's contributions to a province's total generation capacity in a small area like 5% or so. Coal power, as dirty as it is, is completely reliable, ramps up at a predictable rate and can be easily turned off when it would oversupply the grid.
For the $1 trillion spent on the Iraq boondoggle,
the U.S. could have installed 900,000 30 story windmills,
enough to provide all U.S. electricity needs
(although some more needed for equivalent energy needs of vehicles).
Each 30 story windmill costs about $1 million.
Building these windmills, the U.S. could reinvigorate its manufacturing and invention.
Indeed, the U.S. might even catch up with the Chinese who can now
reduce those 900,000 windmills to 1000 vertical cylinder Maglev turbines,
suspending each windmill over 60 acres with super magnets,
http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/26/maglev-wind-turbines-1000x-more-effiencient-than-normal-windmill/
The Chinese windmills will cost $50 million each,
so U.S. electricity needs could by met by 1000 of these
windmills for less that $1 trillion.
The economist notices numerous externalities to the use of oil and coal
-- the most serious externality currently being oil's inducement to wars.
Incidentally, the first working windmill was in Persia (Iran) in the early 600's AD.
It seems foolish to waste $1 trillion in Iraq -- in what country should the U.S. invest its tax dollars?
The same $1 trillion would solve U.S.
electricity needs and potentially all its energy needs (when converted to other forms),
promote research, and found an industry based in U.S.
Doesn't the U.S. consider Manhattan-like projects and Landing-on-the-moon projects anymore?
The U.S. should have a Manhattan-like project for various energy sources.
Why isn't the U.S. spending $100 billion per year on energy research?
A Hong Kong Director for Citibank once asked me why Americans don't value their money
as much as people in countries like China value their money.
Hong Kong recently reduced its maximum income tax to 17 percent,
and continues to have no sales tax.
A country should spend its money wisely,
otherwise it should not be in the business of spending money,
whether on wars or on research.
Many people get agitated at words like "alternative energy".
What source of energy will the world use in 300 years?
Will people then talk about "alternative energy"?
No, their only choice for energy 300 years from now will be
energy we now call "alternative energy".
Shouldn't we at least consider future technologies,
technologies that we will eventually have to use anyway?
It can mean cigarette. It can also mean homosexual, or young public schoolboys* who have to do menial tasks for older boys, although I don't know whether fagging is an extant practice. It originally was short for faggot/fagot, which is a bundle of sticks or herbs, an ancient means of measurement, and a kind of meatball.
Truly a versatile word.
* For those not in the know, a public school in the UK is a privately-run institution, not run by the state. It gets this name because when public schools started, they were open to the public, meaning practically anyone could apply and study there, providing they had the cash.
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
And it was very prescient of them to name the land "England" in advance of the English showing up.
*eyeroll*
I'd guess that the few remaining seafloor dwelling creatures around the coast of the UK would probably love the environment provided by a large, heavy object that can effectively prevent a bottom-scraping trawler emptying the whole sea floor into a factory ship before sailing back to its home country.
Hey, I may be just an ignorant American, but even I know that his name is normally spelt Canute these days, and that the whole "stopping the tides" thing was a brilliant demonstration to a faction of his nobles that a king does not have absolute authority over everything in his realm. IMNSHO, his demonstration was a prime reason why English royalty didn't follow the Sun King's example several centuries later. By then, the concept of limited regal authority was so deeply embedded in the English psyche that his statement that "L'Etat, c'est moi" was seen as almost blasphemous.
I'm not saying I agree with the parent that got modded troll (and hey, got modded troll myself! Yay!) -- I'm just saying there's nothing 'trollish' about them just being wrong. Simple logic flaws could easily lead to their position, and there's nothing inflammatory or malicious about it.
Being wrong is very different from trolling.
Hrm. Perhaps I wrote my post poorly - the point was not to attempt to validate the parent's idea, but to point out that a simple flaw in their logic is far from trolling. There's nothing trollish about being wrong (or even being stupid, if you're mature about it) - and the GP, while wrong, didn't strike me as particularly inflammatory or malicious.
Over here, many people sit down in the evening to slurp the delicious gravy off a couple of faggots. Brain's Faggots are a popular and tasty dish, here in the Welshy end of the country at any rate. "Fag" as a slang or abusive term for male homosexual, although known thru US films, is not in general usage. The colloquial term tend are "a gayer", "shirt-lifter", "puddle jumper", "good with colours", "a good listener", poof queen or bender; sometimes "chutney ferret" , "starfish trooper" or "knob jockey". And I'm sure there are many more. (Disclaimer, I'm not entirely hetero myself, and *I* find these very funny - so if you take offence, please FOAD.
Not to mention has anyone consider the windfall (excuse the intended pun) to the small savaging rodents that live beneath these windmills?
Er, you do realise that we had a bit of a revolution thingy and sort of chopped the king's head off because he insisted on his divine right to rule (or rather to over-rule parliament)? Why yes, this was 150 years before the French, thanks for asking! :)
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
You're an uphill gardener? You bowl from the pavilion end? You play the pink oboe? etc
...is enough to generate 20% of the UK's power needs by 2020. burn
20% has been said previously, but John Hutton's actual comment (which is quoted in the BBC link) was "...wind power to power all UK homes...". He was immediately asked what happened when the wind wasn't blowing, and said something to the effect of "it's always blowing somewhere".
Whilst wind would clearly contribute, I'd much rather rely on a Severn Barrage. If the moon stops orbiting the earth we've got bigger things to worry about.
I TOLD you it was deeply embedded in your psyche! lol My family had left England (every branch that I know about, anyway) by 1638, so we missed it. ;)
It will have damage our weather worse than anything else!
STOP PLAYING GOD!
Stop doing things you do NOT known well!
Stop follow others like a ideot.
Indeed, there is nothing inflammatory about it. That's why it shouldn't be modded as flamebait, and it wasn't. It was correctly modded as troll. The post we're discussing was deliberately seeded with the completely false factoid "in western nations, people actually consume more energy than the solar flux of their entire country", in order to gain attention and spark an irrellevant pseudo-discussion. It's a troll in the same category as the classic "Stephen King, dead at 54" post. There's no inflammatory language in that one either.
The reason your reply is a troll is that you could have easily shot down the post using just wikipedia and a pocket calculator, in about twice the time it took you to write your reply. Instead you rushed to support the troll.
OK I did know that already but it's still nice to see it demonstrated. I would like to point out that we in GB are also not all racist; religious nuts; morons; xenophobic; warmongering (delete as applicable) either.
It's nice of you to assume that just because I'm British I can spell though. :-)
I guess the key think to remember is that a country's leader may be the people's representative but may not represent the people.
There are many hilarious sexual euphemisms, I must admit. And yeah, "fag" as homosexual isn't very common.
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!