The reasons why windmills wont work...

[dennis]

Fusion produces radioactive waste just like fission does.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I used to think like you do. I considered it was my duty to show people how not top be idiots.

Then I ended up in Africa.

Then I came back here.

If its not possible to get reasonably educated people here, to actually understand that if they want X, Y is what they must do..and this thread is PRECISELY that, just how far is one going to get when, faced with people who resent your colour, and your education, and the power you seem to have over them for no other reason than the above?

I don't say that out of any feelings of racial superiority I can assure you. I just came to a realisation that its only the absolute ghastliness of our own history that has allowed us over many many generations to understand what the systems we have in place today, can do for us as alternatives to mass death. And we are in danger of forgetting even that.

Cultural worldviews do not change over night. One can argue reasonably convincingly, that it was the failure of the Catholic Church to have any answer for the Black Death that lead ultimately towards the rational worldviews of science. which are somewhat a-theistic..in the sense that they nether confirm nor deny a creator.. that lead to the Wests ability to deal with disease..

You only need to looks at S Africa today. When the leaders there can blithely state that AIDS is not what the West says it is, and therefore no one needs to change..Africa is dying of AIDS, not because ultimately we couldn't manufacture enough drugs and condoms to deal with it, but largely because the indigenous populution is deeply mistrustful of us, with possible due cause, and tend not to believe what we say.

What should we do? go in and impose cultural apartheid? Re colonise 'strictly for your own good, you understand' and insist that people start to behave in ways that are contrary to the ways they always have behaved, and in that way utterly destroy what culture they have?

Africa runs on lots of babies and a high death rate, and lots of killings. That's a stable way to keep population in check. Remove the means of death, and the population will explode. Its a nasty equation. You can tell people that they can have only one or two kids that will have a good life, or lots, many of whom will die..

The first thing is they may not believe you, the second thing is will they take your advice.

And if you impose your advice on them..as the Chinese did.someone would be screaming about 'human rights'

You cant have your cake and eat it.

You can take a horse to water...

I did some sums when I was in S Africa, and one of the reasons I left was the result of those sums. Ther were at the time something like 1 million 'europeans;' as they coyly termed themselves, living at a sort of fairly decent midle class lifestyle, and about 20 million 'non whites' living from any level of dire poverty up to more or less what we would term lower middle class lifestyles. Lets say in todays UK terms that's like saying we have 3 million people here who are educated and can read, write and earn sort of 30k-40k per household, and 57 million people on sink estates, with no education, very little job prospects, and whose main occupation is therefore roaming around nicking cars, shooting people, getting pissed and taking drugs, having sex and making babies.

No matter how you cut the cake, to simply say 'thats OK, what we should obviously do is simply take the 30k-40k incomes of that 3 million, and redistribute them so that everybody gets £1.5k -2k a year, because thats only fair' is to end up with a society where no one is educated, no one can afford to have anything at all. Essentially thats the 'Mugabe' solution.

A society cannot achieve economic equality, parity of education, and opportunity by waving a magic political wand called 'democracy'. That is the utter, total and complete fallacy of the West.

It has to happen over a period of time - centuries. Our final democratic institutions evolved after many many conflicts between the haves and the have nots. Ther final major conflict being perhaps the Civil war, in which people so tired of bloodshed that they finally decided that by and large they wanted religion OUT of government, and went to a compromise, whereby the C of E were allowed to have a say in the Upper house, in return for catholics not being routinely used as firewood.

Likewise one can look at the emancipation of women, and the extension of the vote to a universal franchise, as being further developments, not that CREATED the society we have to day, but were a response to the growing power of the labouring classes, and women, to take part in and modify the state of society.

To IMPOSE structures adapted from other countries an places and times on other societies, is almost impossible. Cf Iraq.

As far as Africa goes, its either 'Pax Romana' or leave it alone. Africa has to decide for itself what it wants. We can help when asked. We can deny when we don't like what we are being asked, but we cannot wave a magic wand and make Africa suburban england. We tried, and found it possible only for an elite few, and they rest were very very jealous.

We ourselves were colonised by the Romans, and when they left, just how much did we continue to use? very little. They left a religion, which arguably caused as many problems as it solved, but by and large we forgot how to read and write, and do any more than the most basic sums, and degenerated into a mishmash of petty kingdoms and tribal groupings, had babies, died, slaughtered each other, and largely took about another

800 years before we actually managed to set ourselves up in a way that was more civilised that the roman empire was.

Its not sentiment mate. It's a sad facing up to facts. What we consider right and wrong is the results of two millenia of making all the mistakes in the book.

Its YOUR sort of attitude, that expects e.g. Africans to take all that we have learnt and say 'yup, you guys are SO right, we have nothing to offer, we are useless, we must all become Europeans' that is in fact the thing that creates alienataion and contempt and extremism.

I say 'withdraw from where we are not wanted, and let people work out their own salvation'

We should not be interfering in the Middle East either..one of the STRONGEST reasons to build nuclear power stations, and possibly nuclear weapons, is so that we don't NEED to. Oil has come at a very high price, finally. I say too high a price. The vast influx of extremely easy money into that region, has shattered the societies there, and left them with an almost irreconcilable conflict between two ways of life: One adapted to a low income hard life, on which their societies and cultural mores are based, and another one based on easy money, affluence and a disintegration of what they wold call morality - which we would argue is only contingent on a poverty stricken society, but which is none the less deeply ingrained in the collective psyches.

Brave sentiments, but in the end totally counter productive. Since the morality on which they are based is completely alien to those who are on the receiving end. THEY see that as mere signs of weakness, to be exploited.

No, because they have more urgent and prassing needs, like how to deal with a civilisation which is in danger of collapsing under the collective stupidity and sens of guilt it has engendered itself with. Unlike you, I DID learn something from our African brethren. When the chips are down, its you, your family, and your tribe that are who may be best relied upon. And that mans who is still examining his conscience when the shit hits the fan is the man who doesn't see it coming.

I dont say leave africa alone because it deserves it, I say leave africa alone because we simply don;t have the power to change it. We have more urgent considerations: Like how to survive the next 50 years without either becoming a mediaeval society, a police state, or an islamic state, or possibly all three..

[The Natural Philosopher]

So dont give them the guns and weapons and ability to come over here and make it their party.

To supply arms to people whose morality is based on the ethics of hand to hand combat, is deeply short sighted.

Even if you DO want their oil coal, uranium, etc etc.

[Mary Fisher]

So are televisions. And football crowds. And all manner of other things which I don't like :-)

[Roland Perry]

In message , at 14:11:40 on Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Mary Fisher remarked:

If my television is too noisy I turn it off. I can't hear anyone else's.

The football crowds rarely get close to my house, but if I'm in the garden and listen carefully for a couple of hours every other week in the winter I might hear a distant cheer or two.

Wind turbines are a 24x7 whoosh-whoosh-whoosh noise.

[BRG]

M.

Ah! but a lampost is not over a hundred feet high, does not rotate and is far 'greener' to manufacture and erect and requires a damn site less maintenance than a windmill - and works for longer periods!

Well at least the lamposts in my street are coloured green!

As a matter of interest, if the government (bless their little cotton socks) abolished all planning consent for these things (and it seems that they are thinking along those lines) and the local (foreign based) generating company decided to place one or more whacking great windfarms close to - or even on - your property, would *you* accept them for the benefit of doing your bit to 'save the world' - or revert to the *NIMBY* syndrome and start yelling foul?

I wonder which - and would you answer honestly?

It's a little like the 'tree hugger' syndrome - object to all and sundry, yet still use the cars, motorways, oils, petrols, diesels, paper, plastics, timber for your houses et-al - rather than take the true environmentalist way - and live in a cave, walk everywhere, wipe your bottoms with leaves (remember that you are destroying a leaf here to keep your fingers 'clean'), grow your own food - and suffer when a famine strikes (not because of 'global warming caused by humans - anything that produces carbon has by now been banned) but simply becuase of the vagaries of good old mother nature!

And Mary should know a little about some of that at least!

Oh, and if famine don't get you - disease and pestilence will, because there is no power to run the factories that make the medicines/poisons that cure or kill for the benefit of the human race.

BRG

[Mary Fisher]

But others claim that they only turn for a small percentage of the time ....

[Mary Fisher]

I'd welcome them. They wouldn't work in our street though, we've looked into it and the manufacturer told us that there was no point in our having one.

I know that it's a silly argument. The sort of argument given by children - or many men.

I sometimes think that the Earth would be better off without the human race.

I'd certainly welcome an Earth without some of the members ...

>

[Roland Perry]

In message , at 16:34:18 on Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Mary Fisher remarked:

I'm talking about the smaller neighbourhood ones. Not sure they have a means to turn them off when it gets *too* windy (whose job would it be, anyway) and it doesn't seem to need much wind to make them turn. But of course they probably aren't producing much electricity either.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Not 'just like fission does' AT ALL.

Completely different by products.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Not at all. Rational dislike of being forced to accept a non optimal solution that leaves no room for anyone to use the sky at all, for no other reason than a tick-box on a greenies agenda sheet, that has no rational, economic, envoronmental or national benefit whatsoever.

The logix behind windills i totally flawed: why support them?

Not an 'irrational hatred of nuclear power stations' at all, obviously :-(

Actually, it is, A ery large problem. Even at two meters high. Not the

60 meters that the windmills would have to be.

Thatys a nelsons coum or better every few hundred yards.

And the COST of it. We couldn't afford it.

Certainly the end of any pretense at a society not embroiled in abject poverty.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Ad hominens do you no credit.

You could equally cite te case thats its peopkele who dont have to live next to wondmills that are most in favour of them.

I happpen to live fairly close to Sizewell. I;d be a lot happier with that at the bottom of my garden frankly. It wouldn't be nice, but at least in terms of its visual impact, it would be generating 100 times more power than an equivalent vista of windills.

And about ten times as much for the money.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Which just goes to show how little you understand te real situation.

So nothing new there, then. ;-)

[The Natural Philosopher]

Oh. have then evey 50 FEET instead of every 2Km.

Yup. And thats a measly 3MW. whats that? 4000bhp?

Or ten decent car engines. Ive previously calculated the total power requirements of the UK at around 350GW. Now we already know that windmills in sufficient quantities to be of any meaningful value can't operate at a load factor morte much more than 16% or some other form of storage or backup is needed. So that means you heed around 6x175,000 of these mills Somewhat over a million windmills.

Let's put it another way. One windmill the size of a jumbo jet for every

5 people in the entire country.

Plus a supergrid of massive pylons, about 10 times bigger capacity than we currently have, stretching from scotland to london.

To fully guarantee all our energy needs.

Ive been involved in some fairly big infrastructure projects, but this one takes the biscuit.

Contrast around 100 3.5GW nuclear power stations..say one every 80 miles or so, about the size and shape of a large tescos.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I don't see why its needed anyway.

Certainly not after midnight and before 6 a.m. Could save a few windmills if they turned it off.

[The Natural Philosopher]

You can turn thiose off or move away from them.

Not so if there is blanket coverage of windmills.

[The Natural Philosopher]

They turn, albeit somewhat slowly for about 80% of the time although the ones I have seen often seem to have more idle than moving, for reasons I don't actually understand.

I have seldom seen a farm off comepletely moving windmills.

The basic problem is that for MOST of teh tiome there is somewhat too much or too little wind. There is seldom 'just enough' wind for them to match output to demand.

Which is, essentially the ultimate problem with them: you need vastly more of them, and mostly they will be switched off. Only rarely will you be able to utilize the output from all of them.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yiu need to go up a lng way to get steady wind. Probably hihhger than most of te tallest churches and office blocks in ths coiuntry.

I think the boundary layer extends roughly 20 meters (thats about 8-10 storeys ) above the highest obstacles. Including goshdarnit, other windmills. :-)

hm an hour after dark? as long as that?

[The Natural Philosopher]

The are actual accounts of properties withion 100 meters of them becoming unsaleable.

I guess that reduces the whole of the UK to somewhere no one wants to live.

OK, its off to a sunny happy all nuclear france as soon as possible.

OTOH you could ren out the pylons as 'affordable housing' that would shut up the whingers who expect free housing just because they have a degree in 'pharmacology and needlework'..

Exactly: Imagine camping without a tent, without any metallic objects, any means of making a fire, or cooking, without anything manufactured other than what you could make yourself with readily obtainable materials..I wonder if UG bothered to brain the wimps who wagged their fingers and said 'one day you will run out of flints to smash together'

Its all vain posturing. Not one of us has ever had to contemplate a truly sustainable existence: I can count on the fingers of one hand the peoples who perhaps today still live that way..some of the remote tribes in Africa S America and indonesia. You can't even count the Inuit, who have taken to rifles, outboard motors and snowmobiles like there was no tomorrow.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Oh, how FORTUNATE.