Ed Miliband’s planned expansion of offshore wind alone amounts to nine million tonnes of industrial equipment and concrete added to the sea. The sheer immensity of ‘green’ industrialisation is coming as a shock to many, says John Constable in the Spectator.
The low energy density of wind and sun means that extremely large collection devices are needed – enormous wind turbines with large blades, vast areas of solar panels. It is necessarily a capital-intensive and very expensive system.
A concrete example will make this clear. The 1,400 Megawatts (MW) Sophia Offshore Wind Farm on the Dogger Bank is currently under construction and will cover an area of nearly 600 square kilometres (it would just about fit into Middlesex). It is one of many major wind installations that the Government is intending to drive through in its ambition to quadruple offshore capacity. We currently produce about 15 Gigawatts (GW) of operational offshore wind power. To meet this quadrupling of capacity, we would need around 30 more Sophia Offshore wind farms.
The Sophia will use the Siemens Gamesa SG 14-222 DD, one of the largest wind turbines on the market, with a generating capacity of 14 MW. It has three blades 108m in length, each weighing 65 tonnes. The nacelle, the box containing the generator at the top of the tower, weighs 500 tonnes, which Siemens proudly describes as a lightweight machine. Compared to other brands, this may even be true.
The overall height of the turbine is 252m, only 60m short of Britain’s tallest building, the Shard. It foundations will, according to Sophia’s own publicity, be 80 to 90m in length and weigh 1,200 to 1,400 tonnes each. The total weight of each turbine – blades, nacelle, tower and foundations – is likely to be nudging towards 3,000 tonnes.
Sofia will use 100 of these structures, so we can estimate that the wind farm alone accounts for about 300,000 tonnes of industrial equipment, mostly steel, some concrete, and fibre-glass reinforced epoxy in the blades. (For reference, a Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carrier weighs a mere 65,000 tonnes.) And this is before we have taken into account the offshore substations and the cables connecting each turbine and the shoreline.
Multiply all this by 30 to meet the Government’s offshore wind targets, and you arrive at nine million tons of industrial equipment for the additional offshore installations alone. For scale, recall that the U.K.’s total annual production of steel is only six million tons, and you can begin to appreciate the magnitude of Ed Miliband’s plans for the country. This Wind and Sun King makes Louis XIV look humble.
Worth reading in full.
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In any other time Ed Miliband would have been placed in a straight jacket, locked up, and fed industrial strength medicine. In these times a third of the electorate (the ones who still turned out) actually vote for these people to govern us. You have to wonder who’s more insane.
When petroleum was first extracted in the 19th century for every unit of energy expended 100 could be obtained.
How many units of energy does it take to produce and erect a wind turbine together with all the associated equipment, as well as to decommission the old one that it must eventually replace? How many wind turbines would it take to provide the energy to manufacture components of a new one and set it up? In other words, could wind energy sustain itself?
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It is a shame the diagram does not show the depth of the turbine’s foundation. According to the above report, the foundation depth is a third of the height of the monstrosity. Nobody will contemplate digging the things out undersea once their lifetime (10, 15 years?) has expired and one can assume the same thing applies to the wind turbines on land. Previously agricultural fields will be left with these huge blocks of concrete prohibiting future use of the field for anything sensible.
Like the Tank traps at Story Arms Brecon Beacons.
Indeed. Me CO2 does not concern me in the least. But the creation of cement is a huge emitter of C02
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46455844
“Cement is the source of about 8% of the world’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, according to think tank Chatham House.
If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world – behind China and the US. It contributes more CO2 than aviation fuel (2.5%) and is not far behind the global agriculture business (12%).”
No.
That’s why it needs subsidies
The German Industrial Base and Economy is in total collapse. WHY? Because prosperity is directly tied to the price and availability of ENERGY. The Germans obsession with wind where they have around 40,000 turbines has caused them to have the highest electricity prices in the world along with the equally stupid Danes.
—–You would think that other countries would learn from that, but the opposite is true for those countries whose governments pander to the UN and WEF. They follow the Klaus Schwab model where “The lifestyle of the affluent middle classes is unsustainable”. The Ed Miliband’s of this world are in full agreement and want to lower your standard of living and have the utter audacity to claim they will lower energy bills and that renewables are now “cheaper than fossil fuels” ————A BARE FACED LIE. These people do not work for you. They work for the UN and for “Sustainable Development”
It is not just the windmills. The expansion of uncontrolled solar panels because there is no law to restrict them is having the expected effect according to the Duck Curve – lots of unwanted electricity in the middle of the day when demand is at its lowest. Germany has to pay to get rid of the electricity. It is truly insane.
Yep exactly. —–But then you look to see why politicians are doing this and that takes you into UN world of “Sustainable Devlopment” and a world run by technocrats controlling all of the world’s wealth and resources…and YOU
Monsters with 3.000 tonnes on average, including almost 700 tonnes of cement for the foundation. Without hydrocarbons how will you build these? You need to build, transport, deploy, operate, maintain and replace these structures. It makes a nonsense of the green lie, whatever ‘green’ means. In Canada there is a predicted cumulative total of 275,000 tonnes of blade waste between now and 2050. Where to dump them or bury them? You can’t recycle the blades. 700 gallons of lubricant oil is needed every 6-12 months. What is that but hydrocarbon energy? Let’s not discuss the dead animal life or the complete desecration of our environment and landscape.
The carbon footprint of a solar panel is humongous
https://hiddenhistorycenter.org/whyburncoalandwoodtomakesolarpanels/
Indeed, to reach Nirvana (as we call it) will require the most insane use of fossil fuels and rare earths. Mining and pollution on a monster scale; indeed, to save the planet, we will have to destroy it.
All Hail Miliband.
Anyone shocked at the implications of Net Zero has not been paying attention.
Indeed
Nobody is shocked I am sure
I hope all those people who voted Labour and other Net Zero supporting parties suffer greatly from increased bills and defaced countryside
I do not use the word enormity lightly, as it is often incorrectly used merely to imply large scale. However in this case, this hellbent dash to Net Zero is both vast and a monstrous wickedness. I would be delighted to encourage Milliband to use a private jet on a regular basis if he would go to the Congo and inspect the working conditions of the children extracting cobalt, or perhaps a jolly to Indonesia to experience the effect of the lithium mines and factories on the local villages, polluting the rivers and the seas, forcing the fishermen to go further out to sea (using more diesel to reach unpolluted fishing grounds). Or a flight over the vast opencast mines in China and South America? No fracking or drilling in our own country, but to hell with the miners we cannot see, is the best he can offer.
These problems you highlight matter not to the ideologically motivated technocrat
We must be due a winter of ’63 to bring everyone back to the real world.
Just after the solar maximum of cycle 19 in 1957, of course the world was a bit warmer because more than one of the many solar cyclical variations was at a peak then, here in cycle 25 and the upcoming cycle 26 we can expect to be in a grand solar minimum where the entire planet will cool by about 1 Celsius. Cold, hungry, unable to be warmed by heat pumps.
We need a mallet and tent peg approach to getting these ideas into the heads of these idiots.
If 1957 was “a bit warmer” as you say then fine, but actually from about 1940 to 1976 the world according to officialdom was actually cooler than the 20 years that came before, and only started to get warmer from 1976 -98. This led to fears of an ice age in the seventies.
Mac was right!…
1976, 1995 and 2003 were also good ones. ——-Infact if 1995 were to occur now where there were blue skies all the way from April to September the eco nut jobs would be screaming about climate change, when infact it would really just be “natural variability” of the climate. This is why it is very easy to convince people in this country that there is a climate crisis, because people remember all these different years, some colder, some warmer, some wetter, some drier, and so it is easy for them to accept we have a climate problem.
These unreliable generating devices are unable to generate sufficient energy in their life span to build themselves. They operate on a very shallow energy gradient, which makes them particularly useless, the material cost per MWh generated is very high.
The problem is that none of the people in charge are able to do mathematics and they don’t understand physics and engineering. They have the wool pulled over their eyes by other people who can smell the money they can extract from the dim and foolish believers.
We need to do away with them all.
I am not so sure they are dim—–They are motivated by ideology though, and that ideology is one that thinks our standard of living in the wealthy west is too high as there are now 8 billion people all wanting to use the finite resources that are fossil fuels. Our own politicians are fully onboard with this lowering of our living standard, and use “saving the planet” as the excuse.
If the ” crisis” is imminent then surely the manufacture and instillation of these windmills will greatly exacerbate it. I’m sure some genius has done an audit on the carbon footprint and how many years before they save any carbon .
I’m sure that there is no genius at work in any of this folly.
Middlesex????
Yes, the county that brought forth Lords and the MCC.
When I was a lad my address included Middx, but it disappeared I think with the county redrawings of 1974.
Totally terrifying!
They are stupid and ignorant zealots. Green communists. Dangerously addled people. And the wind industry is greedy and will do pretty much anything to get its way. The Danish wind companies are the most avaricious and profit hungry. The Danes are not really nice people. They are still viking raiders and have captured our government and civil service which are too unintelligent to see through the commercial propaganda.
There is nothing green about these monstrosities, or the nonsense which they spout to justify them.
The Eco Nutters in the Establishment are responsible for slaughtering thousands of birds every single year yet prattle on about diversity and “saving the planet.”
Miliband (aka: Millamp/Milliwatt) is just an absurdity well beyond the pale that has no answer.
How can it be that this wealth-destroying idiot is allowed to do this to our country and its economy ? When an offshore wind-farm has been completed, it will only last for 20 years, if that, and will then need new turbines. Who will decommission these things when the country is broke and they are defunct? I bet Mulliband doesn’t include these costs in the contract
There has to be some recourse for ordinary people who love this country and its countryside, to make a legal case against Milliband’s destruction. If Starmer’s government elevates the status of the Law, then that should work in our favour too