Ecotricity - Bristol Port - Wind Turbine Construction Video

Watch our stunning time-lapse video of the construction of 3 wind turbines at Bristol Port. The turbines will produce over 15 million units of new green electricity annually, enough to save around 13,000 tonnes of carbon emissions every year for the next 30 years!

http://www.ecotricity.co.uk

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Ecotricity
• wind
• turbine
• time
• lapse
• constrcution
• renewable
• energy
• power
• environment
• green

[MMGWsceptic]

@kaieteurdevon Contrary to your claim - energy cannot be stored 'easily'. Pumped storage systems are very costly. eg. Dinorwig cost £0.5Bn in 1974 and took 10 years to build.

Existing pumped storage capacity like Dinorwig is already fully utilized responding to demand variations. Therefore additional storage for wind backup should rightly be added to the cost of wind power - which is already 4-to-7 times more costly than conventional power - without including backup costs.

[MMGWsceptic]

@kaieteurdevon The UK's entire pumped storage capacity can only provide 2.7GW for only 5 hours then it drops to 1GW, and finally runs out of water after 22 hours (John Muir Trust report). In the coldest winter months we often get a low-wind anti-cyclone sitting over the UK for days on end. Where's the power going to come from when we need it most? Large scale wind is lunacy.

[kaieteurdevon]

@MMGWsceptic Wind energy can be stored easily using numerous methods: eg pumped storage, compressed air energy storage (CAES), Flywheel energy storage (FES) As the ‘grid is updated and brought up to speed with cleaner more efficient ways of harnessing electricity, storage issues will be dealt with. Gas power stations are NOT needed. The antiquated fossil fuels technology is being replaced with cleaner more efficient technologies. The sooner the better.

[kaieteurdevon]

@MMGWsceptic You still have a lot to learn about wind energy and how it is harnessed and fed into a grid. Fact is wind energy is free, abundant and clean. Gas, coal nuclear etc is dirty increasingly expensive, extremely polluting and obviously tremendously expensive!

Coal and gas power stations are extremely inefficient. The fuel must be mined, and transported huge distances to where it is burnt for energy. Wind however is free and abundant.

[MMGWsceptic]

@kaieteurdevon Your figures above are the max theoretical output under ideal wind conditions . Due to wind variability the average output is only 25% of this.

Even this variable output cannot be fully utilised - eg. if a storm blows up at night when demand is low - the grid is forced to dump the power - so the USEFUL output is even less than 25%..

And gas power stations are still needed to provide backup for the 80% of the time when the wind's blowing to slow or too fast. Madness

[kaieteurdevon]

@MMGWsceptic UK waters hold enough potential from wind alone to supply the UK with an abundance of clean renewable energy with plenty to export.

Offshore wind alone already produces 5GW in UK waters 300 MW at Thanet, another 1GW from the London array being constructed.

More in the planning stage 8GW at dogger bank, 6GW in the Irish Sea, 5GW firth of forth, 3GW East Anglia, 2GW from the channel, 2GW at Atlantic array, 2GW Argyll array and many, many more.

[MMGWsceptic]

@kaieteurdevon It's not physically possible to generate the 30GW we get from coal & gas by wind. The cost, materials & land required are simply too vast:

Consider land area:

30GW ( 0.25 x 2MW ) = 60,000 turbines required

Turbines need a spacing of 9 x rotor diameters for wake turbulence. So area per turbine = (9 x 100m) squared = 0.81km2.

So the 60,000 turbines require 48,600km2

That's 20% of the UK land area. Not possible.

There are more cost & land efficient ways to reduce CO2.

[kaieteurdevon]

@MMGWsceptic Wind turbines harness a free, abundant, constant and clearly renewable resource. Old dirty technologies are heading for the museum and will play no significant part in the future of our energy needs.

The ‘ecological footprint’ of wind turbines are benign when compared to the destruction caused by the construction, mining process and combustion of dirty fossil fuels.