The winter before last (2008/9) the UK's wind farms ground to a halt for two weeks, when their output was most needed.
Of course, you can guess the environmentalists response - wait for it - they blamed global warming for the UKs declining wind!!!!!! Bwahahahaha. You couldn't make it up.
In 1986 a
nuclear power plant exploded, when its energy was most needed.
Of course, you can guess the environmentalists response - wait for it -
they blamed communism for the low security standards in Russia !!!!!!!! Bwahahahaha. You couldn't make it up.
Extremists suck either way. Environmentalists are just as much of a joke as those opposing wind farms, saying they are "destroying their beautiful scenic environments, disturb them with noise and shadows and kill all the animals in a 50km radius".
Aside of some of those arguments being plain out rubbish (you would be surprised how much money wind farm developers pay for "bird studies" and "hamster studies" and "bat studies" and e.g. how strict the restrictions are on how close to any inhabitable space u may build), I like to ask opponents of wind energy the following when they bring up those arguments:
"So you really prefer those ginormous, lifeless holes in the landscape which are a result of coal mining? Or is it letting your children play on top of a nuclear dump-site that you prefer?"
It's always fun, to see their confused look and see them scramble when they are trying to rationalize what they were saying before. Usually they come up with something like "not really against renewable energy OF COURSE, maybe solar or tidal energy..."
The main problem with nuclear power is anyway that everyone thinks it's not a big deal and still the best way to produce power, as long as it is far away. Once a nuclear dump site is established in the vicinity of someones house, the ill-effects suddenly become so evident and it is time to oppose.
And don't let environmentalists fool you. No professional wind farm developer will tell you that we can live without nuclear power for the foreseeable future. But we can work towards living without it, instead of working towards living longer with it.
@your newspaper article
To make it short: "Infancy".
More elaborate: U mustn't forget that wind farms currently running are, for the most part, already ~10 years old (those that aren't, were most likely not standing still. The newspaper only talked about those standing still, naturally. It's news we talking about here and brittish news at that). The technology used for them is not the newest and when they were built, they were among the first ones to be built and no matter how carefully you plan, real life experience can never be compensated for (chernobyl *cough*). Therefore you can never exactly know what will be required of your tech, before you field test it over a long period of time.
And since the technology is in its infancy, the advancements every year are huge as well. Wind turbines and wings produced now and in recent years are very capable of dealing with harder weather conditions. Otherwise it wouldn't be possible for off shore wind farms to be constructed in the near future. The weather conditions there are not comparable to what u find on land. Even if the last 2 winters were quite tough in Britain.
On a sidenote: It doesn't surprise me, that this happened on the Island. Your market is way ****ed up. The way you block yourselves off from the rest of Europe and try to do everthing the "British" way is extremely stupid. As a result, it takes ages to plan and develop a wind farm in England (fortunately Scottland and Ireland are slightly better, haven't done business with Wales yet). As a result of it taking ages to plan, you sometimes cannot buy what is the newest tech on the market but have to stick with what you innitially negotiated with the turbine manufacturers.
That said, it can (and does) of course happen elsewhere as well.
However, conventional energy has taken decades of terrible accidents to develop to a point where they are as reliable as they are today.
If you think what price we have to pay to give wind energy the chance to grow up as well, I think that's more than acceptable.
If you say that wind energy is not an over-regional solution to saturate the power grid of a country and that conventional energies are necessary to balance out the power supply, you are correct, for the moment.
But there are already areas in the world (east-germany for example) where the saturation with wind farms is so great that they produce more energy than can be used in the power grid. And if you have enough surplus, then conventional energies are not necessary to compensate either, becuase it is near impossible that the wind stops blowing everywhere at once and that all wind farms are experiencing technical failures (due to for example extreme cold) at the same time.
