Thursday, December 30, 2010

Over in Britain, the Scottish government says "No!", but

SCOTLAND'S wind farms are unable to cope with the freezing weather conditions – grinding to a halt at a time when electricity demand is at a peak, forcing the country to rely on power generated by French nuclear plants.

Output from major wind farms fell to as low as 2.5 per cent of their potential generation capacity during the cold snap as power demand rose to close to the highest level yet recorded, new figures have revealed
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And why might that be? No surprise to most of you:
Meteorologists say extremely cold temperatures can occur only when there is little or no wind and icy pockets of air are trapped close to the ground, prompting accusations from anti- wind-farm campaigners that wind power cannot be relied on to meet Scotland's electricity needs in the depths of winter.
Over here the government is saying "We did not!"; however,
The data, charted on the Balancing Mechanism Reporting System website, which the National Grid uses to monitor UK power generation, also revealed that at times when wind energy was at its lowest, back-up power had to be piped in from France, where the majority of electricity is nuclear-generated.
And Scotland is planning on closing down the two nuke plants they do have and forbidding any more being built. Glad I don't live there.


Also from across the pond, some slight problems showing up with the new "You can ONLY install one of these!" heating systems.
However, the recent cold snap has revealed a major problem with them. Tens of thousands of people found themselves shivering as their shiny new boilers cut out without warning.

British Gas is understood to have had 60,000 call-outs in Yorkshire alone. And the cost to call out a plumber? It can be between £200 to £300 on a bank holiday. And don’t forget about VAT.
That would be the Value Added Tax that a bunch of our politicians want to stick us with, and that the Brits have been getting screwed by for a long time.

1 comment:

Keith said...

Some (perhaps all?) of the turbines shut down if there's risk of blade icing. They're very effective at launching big hard lumps of ice, a kind of modern day, eco trebuchet.

Looks like some are claiming this may have been Britain's coldest winter for 1,000 years:
http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/view/169577/Winter-may-be-coldest-in-1000-years/

(Check out the left hand side bar when you're there. 40 new towns to house immigrants - have you seen the vids elsewhere of the Eng. Def. Leaggue lot who're getting framed? a happy place, Britain (not)).

There's a pretty satallite image of snowy Britain and Ireland here:
http://met.ie/news/display.asp?ID=97

I'm in the bottom right hand quarter of Ireland.

It's almost a month since we were getting told 2010 is in the top 3 hottest years recorded.

That link seems to have dropped off the end of the Met Eirean news links.