I know, think that through and ask why? Helps to read the paragraph above it and then consider the fuel-source arguments against biomass in the light of the following paragraphs.

I'm considering it in the light of our own plentiful supplies of coal and the potential for CCS if only the boffins were allowed to get on with developing that particular technology.

But this thread is being shifted off noise when Paul's 'concerns' ought really to have been expressed in the "No new nuclear" or "Fuel for the 21st century" threads.

Needs a good jerrycan or two added...

Rgds

Damon

Joiner,

Please do not pressume to know my views and opinions. For what it's worth I am more than happy with nuclear and ultimately it will provide us all our energy needs whether it is by fission or more likely fusion, just not today or in the next decade. I lived as a child in south Oxfordshire and my father worked at Rutherford, next to Harwell, so I am very comfortable with nuclear physics. Also living in south Oxfordshire, an area close or within an AONB, meant you were never far away from a view of Didcot coal power station (when it was being planned models showed trees surrounding the plant as high as the main tower and "disguising" the cooling chimneys; not seen many trees in the UK that are 300 to 600ft high). In the last week even those nuclear power stations that have been approved for devleopment are having issues, let alone the length of time it would take for new power stations to go through the planning process. This doesn't mean I'm against nuclear, it means I'm realistic about the time taken to bring a station online. Maybe we should take a similar approach to nuclear power stations that we seem to have done with wind and pv in regards to development permission. Again in reality this won't happen because of media hype and politicians protecting their seat

Electricity is a miracle form of energy, you plug something in flick a switch and it works, but the majority of the population have no idea how much electricity they use or the imact on the planet caused by how it is produced. Currently in the UK 50% of electricity production is from natural gas, the easy option based on the North Sea, but this is in sharp decline and now we have to import. To me it doesn't make sense to use gas to generate electrictity as this isn't a very efficient use of the energy source, surely better to use it to heat our homes.

Coming back to the subject of the thread. I was trying to make two points, 1. any form of energy production has an environmental and human impact, is the impact on a relatively small number of people any greater or less for windpower than other forms of production like coal or nuclear? 2. the argument of noise / vibration causing intolerable living conditions currently has no means of measurement and is now being used as a counter-argument to any wind turbine in any location by groups opposed to wind turbines.

We are in a mess, wind can help us get out of this mess because this island is blessed with a relatively abundant and predictable supply. Shortcomings in wind can be overcome and it doesn't have to mean the lights go out when across the entire island it is windy. At the moment we don't have storage capacity but that doesn't mean we have the technology availabe to store energy that can be turned into electricity in seconds. You don't create storage facilities if the current generation is easily controllable with no latency. If the generation changes then storage becomes a consideration, but it isn't insurmountable. One distinct advanatage of wind turbines are they are relatively short lived (<30 years and more like 20-25), materials can be re-used, they use a small footprint that isn't heavily contaminated. We can build now whilst tidal power catches up, we can work on changing attitudes to nuclear power and being more aware of the amount of energy that we use.

Paul

Joiner,

In most of this thread you've seemed fairly rational about this up to the last few posts, so I'm going to ignore them and take at face value your earlier insistence that you're trying to keep the arguments rational.

If you want a clear defined target for a change in the law / to get councillors to apply better noise limit figures, IMO you should ignore everything else, and purely target a change to the use of db(C) for the purposes of determining the allowable noise from the turbines outside the nearest properties, as well as at the turbines themselves and in their distance models.

The use of db(A) in these regulations is IMO the entire cause of these problems, and the entire reason that companies can be complying with the noise restrictions while still causing severe problems for the occupants.

The reason for this put simply being that db(A) artificially downrates the db readings of lower frequencies in order to better match the human ear, which is fine in theory at the point of hearing (eg inside the house), but not outside the house as it's the lower frequencies that will travel the most through the house walls etc.

As an example, at the 100htz level, DB(A) will record 18db lower than the actual level recorded in db(C), so using this measure for a noise source that is predominantly operating at low frequencies is always going to cause problems. ie it will record 42DB when the actual db reading should be 60db. That 18 DB is equal to the reduction that could come from 8 times the distance from the sound source (a doubling of distance equalling 6db reduction).

So the simple measure of changing the terms of the conditions from using db(A) to db(C) will dramatically alter the actual allowable levels of bass and sub bass frequencies outside people's homes without any actual change in the numbers allowed.

see this diagram for more details on the difference between db(A) and db(C). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Acoustic_weighting_curves_(1).svg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-weighting

Posted By: CWattersI find that exceptionally hard to tollerate for very long in a way that's hard to describe even if it's not particularly loud.

Good excuse to wallop the kids in the back.
My Scenic makes very little noise when then back windows are open (actually makes very very little noise at moment as turbo is squirting oil, about a year after it last broke down, what a coincidence)

Stigwood, 2011, http://docs.wind-watch.org/Stigwood-shear.pdf

Bass, 2011, http://www.res-group.com/media/846250/investigation-of-the-den-brook-amplitude-modulation-methodology-for-wind-turbine-noise.pdf

AEI, 2010, http://www.acousticecology.org/docs/AEI_WindFarmNoise_2009inReview.pdf

just so my positions clear, I'm a supporter of both on shore and off shore wind, and disagree with most of your points in the last few posts where you've strayed away from the issue of noise.

I don't support largescale windfarms being forced onto people living in surrounding areas based on lies / misrepresentations about the noise problems they will cause either from a moral viewpoint, or a pragmatic viewpoint, as such misrepresentations will only get found out and cause a backlash against wind and wind farm developers that results in nothing they can say being believed for years / decades as a result of poor practice now.

If the wind industry is to be a sustainable form of power generation in this country then it must be done right, and should have been done right from the start, and hiding behind obviously flawed guidance issued 15 years ago is no excuse.

I'm forming the opinion that there probably is a maximum size limit for turbines beyond which the noise problems caused are simply too great to be considered for anything on shore in this country. Or at least that some very clever wind farm designs will be needed to potentially allow for bigger turbines in the middle, and smaller turbines around the outside closest to houses.

Much better noise modelling software is also needed to take into account and mitigate against the impact not just of distance, but topography for both noise and shadow flicker issues.

bottom line, there's no point protecting us against climate change if in doing so it renders vast tracts of the upper areas of the UK uninhabitable, particularly when better design and honesty at the outside could have resulted in much the same power generation, but without the noise impacts.

I'd second that.

I think it was 'windy' or 'gusty' who said a while back that a lot of the wind industry boys were bringing trouble on themselves by misrepresenting the problems, not helped by the government's skewing planning in favour of onshore wind in the face of the mounting criticism of ETSU-R-97. Jeremy Bass's paper is a classic and reinforces all the bad stuff that came RES's way after the 'Wind Farm Wars' documentary, featuring the tearful Rachel Ruffle.

Pushing it with the "retired towny" bit windy. My experience has been of people who have lived in the local villages for a very long time, many of them all of their lives, their parents having worked on the land around the village. The landowner concerned took the farm over from his parents and his grandparents were there before them, many locals having known the family all their lives, hence the bitterness over what he's prepared to do. Of all the local people actively campaigning against, the shortest tenure is eleven years, of the 280 people against, there are only about a dozen 'incomers' and they're only active in that they've signed-up to the campaign. None of the group actively campaigning for the turbines lives within eight miles of the site. I'm involved purely in a supporting role because even my limited knowledge was more than the locals had when they started out, faced with the professionals from Natural Power. It really is a case of the small man against the corporation.

Ever wondered what happens to old wind turbine blades? Too big for landfill it seems the fiberglass blades have to be burnt...

http://www.reinforcedplastics.com/view/319/recycling-wind/

Highlights..


"..from 2040, 380,000 tonnes of fibre composites will have to be disposed of each year:"

"At the moment, there are three possible routes for dismantled wind turbine blades: landfill, incineration or recycling."

"The most common route is incineration. In so-called combined heat and power (CHP) plants, the heat from incineration is used to create electricity, as well as to feed a district heating system. However, 60% of the scrap is left behind as ash after incineration. Due to the presence of inorganic loads in composites, this ash may be pollutant..."

"Wind turbine blades also have to be dismantled and crushed before transportation to incineration plants, placing further strain on the environment in terms of energy used and emissions. Henning Albers suggests that there are also cause for concern in relation to the health and safety of workers involved in the incineration process."

"Grove-Nielsen does not believe that the recycled GRP wind turbine blade material can be reused in new blades, however: “Recycled glass fibres will always have lower strength than virgin materials. Therefore the industry cannot use recycled reinforcement fibres."

"As far as Reinforced Plastics has been able to establish, there is no European-wide legislation in place for the recycling of wind turbine blades.."

bottom line, there's no point protecting us against climate change if in doing so it renders vast tracts of the upper areas of the UK uninhabitable

I'd say that was a bit blanket. If that's what's necessary then it might be an acceptable tradeoff. i.e ultimately protecting against climate change is not optional. Living in upland areas is.

And 'uninhabitable' is probably a bit strong. Even in areas where there are complaints there are plenty of people not complaining too. Maybe some people are just deaf?

Posted By: wookeyultimately protecting against climate change is not optional

Not going to stop it, regardless of causes, adaptation and migration are the way forward.

Posted By: DamonHDWhat about enforced rationing instead?

We have already tried that by having poor housing stock, and infective transport infrastructure and (in some cases) rising energy prices.
Have to tackle the causes not the symptoms. We are all in this together.

Might be true in Cornwall. :-)

The Chernobyl argument is a big distraction and more than adequately covered in other threads. But suffice to say that the record shows the incident had more to do with ancient technology and the absence of fail-safe systems that allowed human operators to over-ride all the warnings. Comparing that plant with modern nuclear plants is akin to comparing a Model T Ford with a Ferrari. The current ageing plants of the UK would not have been replaced with Chernobyl clones and the nuclear technology of the future will probably be based on whatever comes out of the work on LENR or fusion. Fukishima was a hiccup compared to the Bhopal plant incident in terms of fatalities (and consequent abnormal births) and France's nuclear programme (which we benefit from, including the turbines that have to plug into the grid to get going again after a period of calm or too-high winds) has hardly rendered vast tracts of their countryside inhospitable to man nor beast.

All I want is a sensible mix that adds up at the end of the day, not an indecent rush into inappropriate sites for no other reason than a skewed planning system makes it possible to do so.

"I bet a Model-T Ford breaks down a lot less than a Ferrari and when you crash you're only doing 25mph not 125mph." Touché