Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it
‘Powys Council opposes wind farm applications‘ (BBC News, 26 September 2012)
Anti-wind campaigners need to be careful what they wish for.
Every wind farm proposal rejected takes us further down the path of reliance on imported gas, imported oil and imported uranium in order to provide our energy needs.
As demand for energy grows worldwide, this dependency on finite resources will inevitably lead to fuel shortages, ever-rising prices and a dramatic increase in fuel poverty in the UK, which will have a disproportionate impact on communities in Wales.
The major benefit of renewables – particularly wind, wave and solar – is that the fuel is readily available to us all, and it’s free.
With both new generation nuclear and the “new dash for gas” (aka Fracking and UCG) both stalling for economic reasons, we need to put aside specious arguments about aesthetics and/or intermittency and start developing the only practical, safe and sustainable solution to our future energy needs. – before the lights start to go out!
Mr KRoss 
(from Jim Dunkley via facebook) Keith, I don’t mean to be insulting when I say that, I’m simply referring to the viewpoint expressed in this particular blog post. I think it’s safe to say there are plenty of things we can agree on 😉 What I’m saying here is that you cannot disentangle issues of climate change from issues of democratic accountability. Of course China is powering ahead with it’s “renewables revolution” – it’s an Authoritarian, One-Party State. They could stick a load of wind turbines on the Tibetan plateau. Wonderful from the point of view of addressing climate change. Dismal from the point of view of the dispossessed Tibetan!
Jim, wasn’t at all insulted. Problem with communicating online is you can’t see the body language.
Totally agree with you on democratic accountability, but then you have the problem of how to stop people from cutting their own throats.
There is an awful lot of misinformation and misdirection being put about by people with vested interests in nuclear, coal and gas. And let’s not forget that our much loved countryside was once completely covered in trees until it suited us to cut them all down.
(from Maria Ilieva-Banchevanska via facebook) In Bulgaria the suitable area for wind farms is in the north-east just in the way of Via Pontica – the road along which a lot of birds fly south and they are killed by the hundreds. How green is this?
Maria, we hear the same stories in Britain and across Europe, particularly from Spain. But no-one has ever produced conclusive evidence that wind farms impact on healthy birds, even when built on migration routes. There is some evidence that sick or poisoned birds might fly into turbines, but even these incidents are very rare. Rather than just believe what is published in the media, who generally have a vested interest in the status quo, we need to check the facts on the ground. In the UK, even the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) accepts that there is no evidence that wind farms kill birds.
(from Jim Dunkley via facebook) Well Keith, having read the blog post I think the views expressed are rather naive. In Wales, we will get the wind farms, and the gas stations, because we have no political control over either. This “either/or” dichotomy suits the political establishment in London and Cardiff (and their private buddies) down to the ground, because the “Green” movement becomes some kind of moral fig-leaf for the reality, which is nothing more than “energy colonization”. We have in Pembroke now a gas-fired power station whose output outweighs all the Strategic Search Areas in TAN8 combined, so that the Renewable Targets set by the WG in Cardiff Bay are to all intents and purposes, meaningless. We’re never going to hit them anyway!
Well Jim, I’ve been called worse. But surely what would be truly naive would be to assume that things will go on the way they are and we can continue to rely on imported fuels. As supplies dwindle we will find it increasingly difficult to compete with the larger economies, particularly China and India. We hear much about the fact that China is building a new coal fired power station every week. What we hear less about is that they are also rapidly developing renewables and now have more renewable capacity per head of population than we do. So the Chinese recognise the economic realities, if not the environmental imperative.