PowerSwitch

Plans to create England's largest wind farm in Cumbria have been rejected by the government.
The ?55m development would have seen 27 turbines, each 377ft tall, erected at Whinash, near Kendal.

A six-week public inquiry last year heard from campaigners who said the project would destroy the landscape of the Lake District.

Energy Minister Malcolm Wicks said he agreed with the inquiry inspector that the plan should be thrown out.

Environmental groups such as Greenpeace backed the clean energy plans, but campaigners were worried about the visual impact on the countryside.

This has just boosted my pessimism over the future of our country's electricity supply.

It's not as if the turbines were going to be next to Scafell; they were going to be pretty much by the M6 where there are existing power-lines.

The matter of fact is that Wind Energy is one of the best in terms of net energy - Energy Returned on Energy Invested. The fact that it's intermittent is irrelevant; it will produce far more energy than was consumed by its manufacture.

The intermittency can be worked around; it's not an insurmountable technical issue. Eventually we'll have to use 100% renewables no matter what.

Re: Tony Middleton. I read the E.ON.Netz report and it is full of bad statistical manipulation, e.g. Figure 9 indicates the statistical deviation which actually looks good (a fatter "skirt" would not be).
Their text should state the standard deviation (between 63% points), which looks like +/-500MW. Instead they quote 0.1% points, +/-2900MW.

In other graphs they highlight extreme scenarios rather than providing averages with standard deviation.

Remember than Germany is immediately at a disadvantage in comparison to UK where the available wind energy is something like a half of what we have.

Koba wrote:They have a plan

1.7.3. The environmental arguments surrounding nuclear energy centre on the facts that nuclear energy is CO2 neutral and concerns over the storage and treatment of nuclear waste. The civil nuclear industry has proposed a number of solutions to the waste problem and it is now acknowledged that the barriers are institutional rather than practical.

WolfattheDoor wrote: With people like this in charge, you sometimes wonder what hope is there?

LEEK
Matthew Leek. The government claims that it's doing all it can to combat climate change. However, with the recent rejection of wind power plans in the Lake District how can the government say that it's doing all it can to promote green energy?

DIMBLEBY The government has taken the advice - has taken the advice of the inspector that a wind farm should not be built on the - just outside the border of the Lake District in Cumbria and that has caused consternation within the environment movement between environmentalists and between those who want to protect the landscape as opposed to - or addition to securing alternative sources of energy. What do you make of this one - James Purnell.

PURNELL Well I mean you obviously have to have a framework for individual decisions and what was happening in this case was balancing the issues about the environment with the issues of local planning. But the key question is what is the government's overall policy and our overall policy is that we're the only - with Sweden - the only two countries in the EU that are likely to meet our Kyoto targets. We led the world at Montreal in terms of re - getting the progress on environmental issues back on the agenda, we got America and developing countries to join in that in a way that everybody had predicted Montreal would be a complete disaster and yet ...

DIMBLEBY You're not going to meet your own 1997 target for 2010 in terms of CO2 reductions.

PURNELL These are ...

DIMBLEBY You referred to Kyoto but you had targets you're not going to meet and that's partly because it is alleged there isn't enough energy that is non carbon emitting energy coming through on schedule.

PURNELL I think we've doubled renewables, so we are doing a lot on renewable energy. Those are self-imposed targets, they're more stretching than pretty much anybody else in the world is ...

DIMBLEBY Do they matter less because they're self-imposed ...

PURNELL Sorry?

DIMBLEBY Do they matter less because ...?

PURNELL No they do matter and we are looking at exactly how we can develop policies to do that, that's exactly why Margaret Beckett was meeting people this week to look at issues around sustainability. But I think most impartial commentators would say that the UK has been one of the countries which has been leading progress on green issues around the world. And as I say only Sweden, in the European countries, is going to meet its Kyoto targets and we're one of the two countries doing that.

DIMBLEBY Richard Grayson.

GRAYSON The government has a better record on this than it might, although it has been forced to admit that it's not going to meet its own ambitious Kyoto targets, it was aiming for a 20% reduction in CO2 emissions on 1990 levels by 2010 and it's only going to be about 14%. Partly because individuals aren't changing their lifestyles and this is something where people need to live differently, rather than having to do things the government tell them. People need to be buying smaller cars, people need to be getting into car sharing and things like that. [CLAPPING] There are a lot of things that people can do. But overall I think there needs to be a new international agreement and we need to be going to countries like America and getting them to take the needs of the developing world seriously and developing a new framework that will actually cope with the expansion of countries like China.

DIMBLEBY Theresa May.

MAY The country is going - is on course to meet its Kyoto target largely because there was a significant shift from - in terms of the power stations and coal fired power stations, the dash for gas, that decision was actually taken some years ago by the last Conservative government. And sadly in recent years emissions have been going up. But this is something we all need to face. In terms of renewables I don't think the government is doing enough, I think they should be looking at a wider range of renewable energies, I don't like the way they've put all their eggs into the basket of wind farms. As regards Cumbria, I think absolutely the right decision was taken, you don't save the environment by despoiling the environment.

DIMBLEBY Steve Richards.

RICHARDS I think the applause Richard got when he actually put forward some short term pain about car usage suggests to me that on this issue the voters are slightly ahead of the politicians and that the politicians on this can risk taking some quite controversial decisions and not lose votes over it. [CLAPPING]

DIMBLEBY We can squeeze in one more.