Retiring wind farms

A case of 'Extreme Outsourcing'.

Sorry, jane, I meant in the world, not in this country.
However, we do have a lot of hydroelectric plants in this country.The annoying thing about Kielder is it is now owned by RWE.

I had heard that it did - but I didn't know that we had so many plants. Locally, I love our woodchip power station and our chicken poo power station! They always make me laugh when I drive past them in the forest.

This looks intriguing

www.worldcrunch.com/tech-science/bright-idea-french-scientists-turn-to-bacteria-to-power-batteries-/c4s4271/#.U34qbWcU8dU

I have just been looking at energy with my grandson, as he loves wind turbines.
Living not far from Kielder Water, we looked at hydroelectricity.
Apparently the top five hydroelectric plants produce twice as much electricity as the top five nuclear power stations.
Kielder Water produces the most hydroelectricity in England.

It was accepted (:

see how it goes- not looking forward to it (them) I have to say.

Anyone from Northern Ireland that can tell us how well the two underwater turbines are performing?

Quite. It is hard to go anywhere now along our Suffolk coastline without seeing offshore windfarms. At first I didn't like it, I missed being able to see way out to sea with an uninterrupted view, although of course there are still plenty of places where you can do that. Once I spent a whole afternoon watching the progress of an engineer as he travelled from one windmill to another in a small motorboat, mooring up and then disappearing inside presumably to climb hundreds up steps to monitor each one. I bet he was extremely fit!

Better than the legacy of coal mining I'd say - subsidence affecting property, whole hillsides trashed by open cast etc etc. Not to mention the death toll that still goes on, as we saw this week.
Are there any virtuous forms of energy generation?
Liverpool Bay (off the N Wales coast) is rapidly filling up with a giant offshore wind farm - or rather several. It looks spectacular. I think next extension will require another line of pylons to join the one we already have across Anglesey. But you can't keep the environment pristine if you want a 20th C lifestyle with warmth, light etc

To be fair - they weren't that far short of their life expectancy, and no-one could have forecast an ice storm in Texas!

I love the tall graceful white ones, hate the short stubby dark grey ones - but maybe they are better able to withstand the high winds and storms.

Around here we are starting to see whole fields of banks of solar power cells. It's the strangest crop you ever saw. I believe one small field alone powers Red Lodge's sewage plant.

1500 cubic metres of concrete for each base- and that will stay there forever.

We are voting here on 112 200m windturbines to be installed on the tops of our beautiful Jura mountains this week-end- and people are being bullied into this and lied to- as the only alternative to nuclear power in order to satisfy our energy bullimia. Tragic.

I quote a sentence from the first comment beneath the article
'Wind farms, the biggest scam in corporate history.'

and I would add in political history, the biggest scam since the South Sea bubble.