some general informaiton on wind turbines, page-12

Hi Butcherboy,

Thanks for your wise words on the other thread. I should have TOUed that clown instead of dishing it back out.

I love wind turbines. They give an impression of elegant simplicity but reality is they are high value precision engineered machines. Every watt of power the produce over their embodied energy would be saving some carbon and that is a positive from a global point of view.

No doubt the intermittent nature of wind is a significant issue although if wind power output were to be tied to power usage by say desal plants there would be less need for thermal stations to be running on spinning reserve.

Green energy users subsidise the production costs of wind energy I believe but this is a matter of their choice and I have no issues. Not so sure about the government subsidy, a bit too much like picking winners from my point of view. Same goes for government subsidised solar and geothermal. Wont stop me trading GDY or putting in a subsitised solar voltaic system so I guess I am as two faced as any.

I keep coming back to nuclear power as potentially the most cost effective source of base load power. Reality is that Nuclear power exists because of massive government subsidy, some of it ongoing. However I'm selfish enough to be grateful that it wasn't our government doing the subsidising. We can buy a gen 3+ reactor such as Westinghouse AP1000 and pay zilch for all the loot good old Uncle Sam has spent cleaning up the design and the environment.