2024 Election thread

52nd out of 250 territories, so outside the top fifth. Building some wind turbines is not going to have any measurable effect on population density. To add 1 percentage point to the amount of developed land, you would need to build 2,436km2 of wind farms. That's roughly 1.5 times the area of Greater London.

We are planning to add 15GW of onshore capacity (as well as 45GW of offshore capacity), which at 19.8 MW/km2 means 758km2, of additional land. That's not completely covered, obviously - there are quite big gaps between turbines - but we are adding less than a third of a percentage point to the amount of developed land.

It's not going to make a difference you will notice unless you live near a farm and the vast majority of people don't, by definition. Urban areas are terrible for wind farms.

As for wind farms stopping people from enjoying the countryside, the Brecon Beacons are pretty popular despite the large wind farm just outside the boundary at Pen y Cymoedd and various others along the Heads of the Valleys. North Devon has several, too.

Dare I say, this is all coming across a bit social sciences 😉

No you're right, nobody but you could possibly understand. In fact as it's impossible for any of us to imagine or relate to unless it's actually happened to us, there's no point in you continuing to explain it to us.

I'm intrigued by the idea that wind farms contribute in a meaningful way to light pollution.

Yeah funnily enough I wasn't thinking of people who think a grass verge is wilderness.

But have you noticed no one expressed any sympathy whatsoever for people, like me, who are badly affected? The attitude is that they *must* go somewhere and there *must* be casualties.

The closest we got was Brian saying we'll of course people should be compensated, in a sector that doesn't.

Fair enough. It was more that the Southern Uplands are largely now a power station.

What about North Lanarkshire was a planning mistake? The point is, it wasn't. That's acceptable development.

The whole band across southern Scotland means the flow of industrial turbines is fairly constant as you move around a very wide area. If all upland areas of England and Wales, with the exceptions of national parks and landscapes, are subject to the swarm of applications in the same way then people will notice and start to push back, ultimately to the detriment of renewables - at least in my view.

I am reminded of the furore about fracking sites, which are extremely compact, temporary and at most 20m above ground. And also solar farms.

England has 10x the population density of the parts of Scotland that have been selected to "do their part".

As pangolin says, if you build anything anywhere someone will be upset about it and claim it threatens to ruin their life. We currently have a situation where the guiding principle of the planning system is to not offend anyone anywhere. This leads to wasting of public money bordering on the obscene and delays and abandonment affecting everything. Railways, roads, bridges, homes, power stations, schools, hospitals, prisons to give just a few examples. We are putting 'not upsetting anyone' above everything. It has to stop if we want to continue to live in a developed country.

Most of the opposition was based on disruption and noise - not on the carbon footprint. Oh, also on the supposed risk to water quality, which was largely spurious.

And earthquakes

Oh yes, I forgot about the earthquakes. We can't have land movements on the same scale as when Leicester City score.

Don't get me wrong, fracking is a bad direction to go in, and was a daft Tory policy based on the US. It's just an example that people tend to strongly dislike industrial development. Perhaps I'm wrong, but housing seems to elicit less ire.

RSJT points out that power lines will also be a hot potato. Yup.

The only thing I disagree with is the needs must point. There are alternatives.

I suppose there will be objections to those - e.g. the solar farm thing in the news. And I don't know, genuinely, how much objection other than from Trump, there is to offshore wind farms. Much less, I suspect.

I think you might be surprised at the places that are deemed not to have many people living in them (or visiting).

Compensation doesn't exist.

You'd be brave, you climate change denier you.

Yes. How TF do you think our rail and road network, not to mention all the existing power stations were built? The only difference is that the people who were inconvenienced by those things are mostly long dead.