http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/22/wind_intermittency_study/
Not sure why but people who are practical about such things as saving the planet don't seem to given much of a voice or they are labelled as cynics or nay-sayers but unfortunately, it is the practical people who have the job of planning these projects for power generation into the next century and they cannot plan on airy-fairy ideas or idealism. It seems fair enough to say that England could benefit from a lot of wind energy. The wind is reasonably common here and we could tap it BUT, BIG BUT, it cannot be relied on 24 horus per day 365 days per year yet the energy requirement for the country although it varies, is still required all the time. The report mentioned above basically says you cannot have a large amount of wind energy making up your output, only as much as the other power stations can make up for if the wind dies. The only way you could use wind effectively would be to use it for things like water heating or battery charging where drops in the output would not have an immediate or drastic effect but people don't talk about that. In addition, you need to litter the countryside with these things and although they have an architecural elegance, you wouldn't build the Gherkin building in the middle of the Cotswolds so why build turbines? They are not massively powerful for their intrusive size and there is only so much energy available in the wind in the best case at the optimum speed. So overall, their output might only be 40% of their rated output (or less) over a year. This means installing 100Gw to get 40Gw on average (perhaps 100Gw some times and 0 at others!).
We need to forget this white elephant and look at more useful things like reducing energy consumption in houses (existing as well as new builds) and installing things like solar water heaters as standard which are massively useful to most people!
Bring the revolution.
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