Turbine fire war of words

Has anyone noticed their electicity bills have been reduced since the country has been covered with wind turbines? Last week we were told our bills are going up again another £100 a year.

@ Joh Yelland Re:Biomass

While the theory of biomass is all well and good, it doesn't work in practice. You have to set aside land for biomass fuel production, land that, then, cannot be used for food production. So while it "doesn't rely on imported fuel", it will push us further into the red with regard to our ability to feed ourselves as a nation. Biomass is not, and never can be, a viable means of generating electricity. Wind power can be.

Oh dear, I meant TOO much, not to much.
Useful tip for contributors: IWCP seems to have a 1000 character limit. Type your comment into Word, double click on the “Words:” button at the bottom left and you get the character count instead. Then copy and paste.

Biomass has its good points – most importantly, its electricity is demand driven, not supply driven and intermittent like wind’s. It is less environmentally invasive per MW at the point of generation, and it is nationally secure if it doesn’t rely on imported fuel. It also has its bad point; a CO2 emission on a par with fossil fuels. Yes, you can replant to absorb CO2 by photosynthesis, but that is an unrelated action which could equally be claimed to neutralise CO2 emission from fossil fuels, cement manufacture or anything else. I also suspect, although I haven’t done the sums yet (I don’t believe anything, including myself, until I’ve done the sums), that for biomass to make a significant contribution to energy needs would need an unrealistically large area for growing its fuel. The reason that I suspect this? It is only taking us a few hundred years to use up most of the fossil fuels that were deposited over a hundreds of millions of years. So my instinct is against to much biomass…

Isn't it strange that the Thwarties are against something which originally Real Ventures Biomass Plant had earmarked to supply electricity for? Biomass and Thwart now where do we start?

...and of course I meant CAN'T reach it so it can't be put out...

Wind turbines are an enormous technical achievement, and I don’t just mean their 125m height. But, like any high power high voltage machines, a component failure can result in fire. Once burning the fire brigade can reach it so it can’t de put out. Safeguards reduce the risk, but they cannot eliminate it. Blade failure is more common than fire and, as the rotor weighs 38 tons, at least as undesirable, but fire is the second most common failure mode and should not be ignored. In fact it isn’t; a press release on the Vestas V80 fire from Infinis, the Ardrossan wind farm operator, states, all Infinis staff vacate wind farms when wind speeds exceed 55 mph and therefore no one was present on site at the time of the incident” - so they are aware of the risk. (continued below)

(from above) There have been many other fires – in April this year for example a similar turbine caught fire in Gross Eilstorf. But how many? If no one was killed or seriously injured and no photographer was around at the time of a fire would we get to hear of it? I’ve never seen a press release on a turbine fire that wasn’t preceded by a press report.
I do however believe the risk of fire is fairly small, but because of the dreadful consequences of fire in a forest it needs to be extremely small. The descending fire ball in the picture is about the size of a bus and it is landing a long way from the turbine. We should follow other legislatures that have not allowed wind turbines close to forests - “as a standard precautionary measure”. As a chartered electrical engineer with experience in high voltage and high power I know what I’m writing about.

David Webster. what is the name of the river that flows through PARKHURST FOREST? I know of one about a hilf mile to a mile away called the Medina..

@ David Charlton,
Sorry I did not notice your 2 lines "As always David spamming his petition, Along with a very biased and innacurate thwart report.. Whos next to comment.....Don"
I hope to have a nice surprise for you on Friday.
Hope you enjoy it.
Love
Don

Any views or opinions presented in the comments above are solely those of the author and do not represent those of the Isle of Wight County Press.