More on light bulbs ...

[David Hansen]

On Thu, 9 Sep 2010 01:52:49 +0100 someone who may be "Arfa Daily" wrote this:-

It wasn't me who came up with those figures.

Such figures will have been produced. Were I to make the time to find some you would probably dismiss them in a sentence, so I'll not bother. The figurs/links below are ones I had on my web browser anyway, so they didn't take time to look up.

"The annual cost per bill for each scheme was £1.20 (EESOP), £3.20 (EEC1) and £9 (EEC2) excluding VAT".

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Having been to some of the largest wind farms in the UK I have a little idea about noise. There is certainly some machinery noise if one stands directly under the nacelle. By about 10 metres from the base of the tower it is inaudible. Noise from the blades can be heard further away, but by the time one is the height of the top of the blade away one cannot hear it. With a large wind farm, if close enough one can typically hear noise from the nearest turbine or two but no others. From outside a wind farm the sound of tractors is the loudest sound, then other motor vehicles, then humans speaking, then sheep and then birds. The noise of the wind in the trees is louder than the noise of the wind farm

Many things could "distract" drivers, including all sorts of things in the countryside like fields, animals and buildings. The road "safety" lobby used to remove "dangerous" trees, but campaigning has reduced this. I did once go to the trouble of debunking one of the well known anti-wind lists of deaths they claimed were caused by wind generation. A handful of "distraction" deaths, half of which were people crashing into lorries carrying parts of wind turbines. If they had instead crashed into lorries carrying coal or parts of a steam turbine would the same people have made a fuss about all those people killed by coal generation? I very much doubt it.

Instead of believing in "studies" why not take a look at the reports Vestas commissioned. They are at the bottom of

I imagine they will be dismissed in a sentence, but a few other people who I have pointed to the reports have been open enough to tell me that they covered everything they could think of and seemed accurate.

Ignoring all the other problems it can only be sustained until the uranium runs out. The idea of extracting it from the sea is a variant of perpetual motion machines.

[Andy Burns]

No, you dug it up and burnt it to power your lights. Oh dear I'm sounding like a greenie.

[Mark]

Only if you generate electicity by burning coal. Most of ours come from gas.

[Mark]

These are very expensive and probably only available from specialists.

I have got some new ones that are still too big.

[Mark]

And the ear.

Not my experience. When going on a walk in the countryside I heard (or felt) a very disturbing low pitch sound well before I could even see any wind turbines. As I approached it got worse and I left the area as quickly as possible.

[Arfa Daily]

But you were happy to quote them ...

I'm sure that there are figures out there, but it is doubtful whether any would actually be *truly* accurate, because many hundreds of processes and shipping routes would have to be factored in, which would be an almost impossible task to do accurately. Every last one of these processes is valid, and contributes - however insignificantly - to the total energy budget consumed by the manufacturing and transporting of a CFL before it ever gets to your light fitting, and the proper disposal and recycling of it after a fails anything from a day to 10 years after you install it. It is this 'hidden' energy cost that is conveniently ignored by the advocates of the technology. A conventional light bulb on the other hand, uses only a fraction of the material and manufacturing processes and shipping routes, so it would be comparatively easy to produce *true* manufacturing and disposal costs, for that particular technology.

But that's still millions and millions being collected in to subsidise a substitute technology that has not, despite what you think and say, been well received over the last 30 years by the general public at large. If everyone thought it was so good and necessary, they would be happy to pay the extra. Instead, only a small minority *do* think it's ok, which has led to a slow and unenthusiastic take-up at the 'real' price, necessitating this nannying by the back door on price, and legislative banning, to try to persuade - read *force* - people to buy them.

Oh dear ...

I'm sure that you will dismiss the newspaper that this :

in as being another rag that just tells lies to its readers, but this article is just one taken at random, from many. Just because you can't hear the subsonic noise that these things make after a visit or two to wind farms, don't be so arrogant as to dismiss the miseries of people who have to live near the dreadful things, and put up with the noises that they *do* make under different weather conditions, every day - and more importantly night. The amount of power that they generate for the amount of disruption that they cause, is vanishingly small. What did it say at the bottom of the article ? Three and a half gigawatts for 250 of them, was it ? That is a joke in the grand scheme of things. And to suggest that they are no more distracting to drivers than a field of cows, is such crass nonsense, I can't believe you even said it.

That's like saying when electricity generation was first invented, we'd better not do it, because it will only work until the coal / gas runs out. The amount of uranium used is very small and lasts a very long time. The latest nuclear sub built by this country, employs a reactor which uses only a couple of kilos of the stuff, but has an equivalent power output to that required to "power a city the size of Portsmouth" according to the naval commissioning engineer that was interviewed about it on the programme about building the sub. Of course uranium will *eventually* run out, but in the meantime, it is the most viable alternative to fossil fueled generation plants. Joke technologies like wind and solar, are only valid in the minds of the 'save the earth' brigade. In terms of effective use of resources, they're not even on this planet, let alone in the right ball park ...

Arfa

[dennis]

Most of the stuff in CFLs was in thermometers and barometers and is recycled.

A very small amount of it.

If you break a tube while its on just hold your breath while it cools down to a metal. The metal is actually pretty safe compared to other forms it can take.

[dennis]

10m from the base is about 1 extra metre from the nacelle! 8<

You can only extract energy from the wind when its there. Of course climate change will change wind patterns so you may have to move all the wind turbines to somewhere the wind still blows.

Oh and it is sustained by the fusion reaction in the sun which will be useless once all the hydrogen has been used up.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Thorium from the sea, mostly.

Then breed the uranium.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yep, them things do wuther!!

subsonics carry for MILES.

[The Natural Philosopher]

You would be surprised at how much coal and nuclear we still have.

[Tim Streater]

[snip]

Unfortunately this is correct. I say unfortunately because it means that there is no "magic bullet" in terms of replacement energy sources. I have a niece in the windmill business and she is quite clear that each of the eco sources can only provide about 10% each of our overall requirement. And that with a huge investment.

Nuclear is the only sensible way, while we research fusion. Deuterium can be extracted from the sea, in the long run.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Even if nuclear only buys the west 100 years, that's still a hundred years.

Coal bought us 100 years. Gas and oil bought us another hundred years.

At today's population levels to use reewables would destroy teh planet as people over fished, over farmed and over everytuhunged everywhere.

'The Deserts of Iraq aqnd North Afrca are the result of 3,000 years of Organic farming"

[Huge]

This is a lie.

This also is a lie.

As has already been pointed out, this is a stupid and irrelevant number.

Precisely.

BTW, about 30% of the bulbs in my house are CFLs. But I only fit them where it suits *me*, not the likes of Hansen.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Change that for taste, then.

[Mark]

I'm surprised about coal -- still about 30%. Nuclear is at 20%, Gas at 40%.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Which rather invalidates 'most of ours comes from gas' doesn't it?

[Andy Champ]

Personally I don't find the odd turbine or two unnattractive. I have doubts over the numbers required through - the UK peak consumption is something over 60GW, which means (surely I've got this wrong?) 30,000 of those 2MW units, each of which is as tall as St Paul's Cathedral.

Hang on, 25% load factor. Make that 120,000, and hope we don't have a day with less wind than average, or a nationwide gale. That's something like one every mile over the whole country.

We've got a fair spread of turbines around the country; do you know what's the lowest load factor they've produced country wide? Because that's an input into the calculation of how many we'd need.

"It will generate approximately 113,000 MWh during a 20 year period, which is 20 years."

I read it, even if their editor's didn't. That's a rather more generous load factor than experience would suggest. (though it doesn't invalidate their arguments; but see above)

There's plenty of uranium to last us until we have fusion. Depending on the numbers you believe we might need to do a bit of breeding and reprocessing though, which is a rather messy business. We've got so much U238 that the Yanks are sticking it in bullets to fire at the Iraqis - it's only U235 that's scarce.

There's more uranium in coal station smoke than seawater.

Andy

[Derek Geldard]

A bit like "Tarnation Street Farm" perhaps?

I just got back from a few nights in an alpine B&B in Northern Italy. Over half of the landlord's CFl's had failed, and as I discovered during a thunderstorm at 3-30 am, the survivors took a seeming eternity to warm up which SWMBO found to be molto scary due to the Hammer House of Horror/Psycho effects.

Derek.

[Derek Geldard]

To be more accurate all this says (aside from the very obvious salesman's puff in the name they have chosen for it) is...

"Instant ?flicker free start?, with no switch delay" ...

I.E. Does not exhibit the flickering traditionally associated with old fashioned glow switch starters, and this is all it says. It is silent on the matter of mercury needing to be vapourised inside the glass envelope everytime the lamp starts from cold and how long this takes,and the performance of the phosphor when cold, amongst other effects.

Derek