2024 Election thread
Comments
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Yeah Brian the modern turbines are almost as high as the prominence of Dartmoor, and they move. You literally have no concept of the scale until you are close to one. It is trite to compare a modern wind farm to a 19th century tin mine, I'm sorry.
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And the other noise sources are minor. Having lived on a farm, under a flight path etc. they come they go, your brain adjusts.
The quality of turbine noise differs from all other noise sources. It doesn't stop. It is comppletely and unnarurally repetitive. It is loudest at night.
The closest comparison would be living near a wedding venue and listening to the distant base. Of one song. On repeat. All the time. Every night.
I had a 25m one put up about 70m from my first house. I literally couldn't sleep without ear plugs.
I moved house as a direct consequence.
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Yes, offshore wind is viable but it's not slightly more expensive: it's half as much again per megawatt hour. BEIS has onshore at £68 and offshore at £106/MWh.
Windswept moorland is no more wild than the cultivated farmland at the bottom of the hill. There are a very small number of scraps of native rainforest left but the rest is all man made. Nobody is going to build a windfarm in a forest. The fens are hardly wild either.
We are not a very, very crowded island if nobody lives in 90% of the land. Granted it is more crowded than Canada, but so is pretty much everywhere.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
Can't see many onshore wind farms being built in England unless there is a move to zonal pricing
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I doubt offshore wind will be that high in the next auction. Could easily be lower than onshore.
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Fair enough - but at least that's moved onto the "How can we make this happen?", rather than "Can't".
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No, we are one of the most densely populated countries on earth, particularly England. Look it up. It's also unfair to compare an island to a densely populated patch of a continent, such as the Netherlands, because it's harder to get anywhere that isn't.
I am aware that there is nowhere in Britain that is truly wild. But I place a high value in terms of quality of life and liveability on there being places that feel wild that can be visited to escape the densely populated remainder. Judging by the full laybys even in remote parts of Scotland and the overwhelming visitor numbers to such places down here, I'm not alone. It is part of our nature to seek out these places.
The loss of such spaces is intangible, irrevocable (in our lifetimes) and avoidable.
Unit costs fall with scale. Offshore turbines can be bigger and if they are more numerous also, the gap would be much smaller.
We should be world leading at manufacturing and deoying them. We aren't. We buy them from Germany.
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This idea that nobody else can comprehend the scale of wind turbines is pretty odd. They are not rare. There are a bunch about 2k from me. A quick google tells me they are are around 125 metres tall which is apparently above average.
- Genesis Croix de Fer
- Dolan Tuono0 -
Not any more. Par is about 180m. And define a bunch. If you have 3 or 4 bunches of 18+ turbines 50% bigger in line of sight of each other, is that more or less intrusive than a bunch of 5 or 6 small ones on their own?
Go to North Lanarkshire and let me.know.
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Hands up who likes the night sky? Hard to see these days, unless you go into the hills away from towns.
Shame though, those flashing navigation beacons.
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No I've never seen more than 3 in one place 🙄
- Genesis Croix de Fer
- Dolan Tuono0 -
It's a bit ludicrous to claim the UK isn't a world leader at deploying offshore wind. Only China has more.
Also, even if you ignore all elements of construction other than the turbines, some of these are still made in the UK. Siemens has a factory in hull and Vestas one on the Isle of Wight.
You should rant about transformers. They're not made in the UK and there is a world shortage.
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Looks like a rather featureless landscape for this windfarm (200m tall)
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Whitelee has 215, Clyde has 152 and isn't very far away. Neither is Crystal Rig, but that's only got 85.
Is that sort of scale okay for the Dales, Pennines or mid-Wales?
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Sorry I thought it was obvious I was being sarcastic.
I guess the one near your old house was irrelevant then as it was just 1.
- Genesis Croix de Fer
- Dolan Tuono0 -
50% bigger than what?
- Genesis Croix de Fer
- Dolan Tuono0 -
125
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Taller should be better, the sound is further away. Great news.
- Genesis Croix de Fer
- Dolan Tuono0 -
There's only 8 turbines, but West Lothian has several more nearby wind farms. It is pretty constant out that way for 20 odd miles. Cycled past it in March oddly enough.
It's pretty grim out there for sure, particularly if you live in the town of Breich, but flip the view round 180 degrees and you can see its right up against and therefore visible from the entire west side of Pentland Hills regional park though. Pretty sure you can see those from Costorphine Hill also, but I could be wrong.
It isn't "featureless" if you live there. Or at all, to be honest. It's been poorly managed with post war plantations but it is qualitatively similar to lots of other places considered "nice" and dotted with commuter towns and villages.
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The tips of the blades passing the towers is where the noise comes from, which is the same height. Bigger equals faster. About 200 mph these days.
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An anecdote I've shared before. I served my apprenticeship making and designing transformers, time served for a few years until we sold some to China, including the designs. No surprise that 2 years later they were selling clones for less than the cost of materials, and I along with 1/3rd of the staff were made redundant (last in, first out). The company closed down within 5 years.
This is why they are not made in the UK any more.
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0 -
Wasn't irrelevant to me, because it ruined the enjoyment of my home. I had both noise and shadow flicker. You won't know what it's like until it happens to you.
Like I say, there will be a LOT of objections to developments in the picturesque upland areas of the UK. The leafy south will be spared by weight of opposition, the north and Wales won't.
Couldn't give a shit about Cambridgeshire and east and north of it, personally, so go nuts out that way.
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Plenty of space there apparently as they aren't building houses on the available space.
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0 -
Red light has far lower impact though. It’s why red torches are used by astronomers or people who need to protect their night vision. The impact of modern LED street lighting will be a bigger impact in most situations even if the nearest built-up area is miles away.
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We don't make much, BB. All the composites development is in Germany and Scandanavia as far as I am aware.
Point taken about deployment. Less clear whether the UK offshore industry is doing it. The Scots don't think they are getting enough of the work.
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Do the streetlights flash near you?
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Funny you should say that, but the reason all those towns are in roughly a line is the railway from Edinburgh to Glasgow. This was reopened not long before I moved up and upgraded to electric more recently to offer a third commuter route. I can assure you there's what's technically called a "fuck-ton" of house building out there.
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Still not really affecting the quality of the night sky though. As someone who is constantly waiting for a clear night to find a dark sky area to take photos the navigation lights of wind turbines would be low on my list of problems.
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Yeah. I do some aerospace composites work. The engineers are world leading, and what they are developing will support aviation for 50+ years. But the two sites they work at lose money so when they scale up, it won't be here.
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True. It's just a 24 hour visual intrusion. Flashing at night, moving during the day.
Here's a wind farm density map of Scotland -
Turns out the wind farms are by and large pretty damn close to the big population centres in the central belt and Aberdeen. I see this as the sort of "low value" landscape that will be targeted, but these are closest to where we all live and most commonly access for day-to-day recreation and a fair number of people live in close proximity.
Perhaps my opposition is not rational, but the irrationality is about to get a very great deal more widespread if the industry carries on in the same vein.
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