Re: windfarm


"Adam Whyte-Settlar" <grawillers@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:43dd89f7@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> "R.Peffers" <peffers50@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:drjcet$hc0$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>> > Geez - you can see London from space even when most of the city is
> asleep.
>> > Pity you can't see space from London.
>
>> As a matter of fact Abetay Uni in Dundee has just started a scheme to
> have
>> light powered wi-fi computer points on the roofs of some Uni buildings
>> and
>> to have lighing provided by the same sources. They plan to keep extending
>> the scheme. There are also several towns building bus shelters lit by
> light
>> cells on their roofs.
>
> I guess it's a step in the right direction but it smacks of tokenism to
> me.
> Especially when some of these bus-stops are outside massive shops that
> keep
> their 50Kw window-display and store lights on 24/7.

The TV text item claimed that the first few units were in the Uni itself but
that they were rolling the Wi-Fi system out across the town bit by bit.

> I have a bit of a thing about light-pollution. (As with most things).
> The night sky is fantastic where I live at the moment and is often
> commented
> on by friends who spend week in week out in the nearest town and happen to
> visit on a clear night.

I am a country dweller and I find the village has spread out too far in my
direction. As it happens the local council came along a couple of years ago
and re-did all the street lights along the road in front of the cottages. I
could well have done without any street lighting. There was method in their
madness, (or should that be madness in their method). Next thing they a
developer was building on a site around the corner. Thankfully they have not
yet built on the fields behind us. I have a little conservatory that faces
that way and it has two sliding doors that allow a very comfortable view of
night skies.

> In fact, to say they 'comment on it' is something of an understatement.
> More like "WOOOOOWW!!!! That's absolutely ******* AMAZING!!" etc etc etc
> half the evening.
> It's such a shame that some people (*most* city-dwelling people by
> definition I guess) go almost their entire lives hardly ever seeing the
> universe that is their home.

The trouble is that the crime figures would go through the roof without town
lighting.

> Even here though, I am aware that we still only have about 50% visibilty -
> Christchurch (pop.300,000) is only 30 miles away so that third of the sky
> is
> still obscured by the light pollution. In the other direction however lies
> 3,000 miles of the South Pacific and then the Antartic.
> I was once 'lucky' enough (ie I planned it) to spend a couple of nights
> sleeping under the stars on the island of La Palma in the northern Canary
> Islands. Most of Europes big telescopes were a few hundred yards away (I
> was
> at 8,000 ft in my Scottish mountain tent) and it was truly awsome dude. I
> don't know if I was fortunate in my timing or if it is a usually-invisible
> nightly occurance, but I quite literally saw more meteorites that night
> than
> in the rest of my life put together.

I have fond memories of lying flat on my back as a child on the farm and
watching the night skies. As part of my childhood was during WWII there were
no light from the towns and villages around the farm.

> Their are strict laws regarding light pollution and even the main town
> (pop
> 12,000?) has only small white street-lights that have shades above them. I
> cannot begin to tell you the aesthetic effect this has on the appearance
> of
> the place at night compared to hundreds of those huge ugly orange monsters
> that deface our own towns and cities - and even rural villages these days.

>From my front window I see distant orange street lights and they are not
even for a village but a small hamlet of a few cottages in the middle of
nowhere.

> I am aware of the argument that good lighting reduces street crime and
> attacks on women etc.' but fortunately no-one has yet bothered to tell the
> wonderfull people of La Palma about it and street crime there is virtually
> non-existent.
>
>
> As far as I can see the best way to use wind farms is
>> to use the electricity to produce oxegen and hydrogen and to store the
>> hydrogen locally to be used as fuel. In this way it will not matter if
>> the
>> wind is not producing too much power during peak demands.
>
> Yeah - maybe that's a better idea than pumping water. Can't claim to be an
> expert on energy storage.

Neither am I but I do usually give much thought to such thins. My thoughts
were that the main effects of the fossil fuels running out will be in the
road, rail, air and sea travel engines. There seems little hope that crop
based oils and alcohols can cope with demand and thus fuel cells and/or
hydrogen cells offer a better alternative.

> In either case I'm sure it wouldn't be beyond the capabilities of our
> nation of engineering geniuses to come up with a solution if their was a
> lot
> of money to be made out of it.

There is no doubt that there will be a lot of money to be made from fuel-
there always was.

> But thats the rub - all this is lip-service and tokenism until the oil
> runs
> out. The most powerfull (and evil) people on the planet are running the
> energy biz for personal profit and there is no way they will develop
> eco-freindly systems until they either run out of oil (which despite the
> nuclear-propagandists bull*** isn't going to happen for centuries) or
> they
> can make even *more* money out of alternatives.

It is not a matter of the fossil fuels running out but of them becoming
uneconomic to produce. Witness the ever rising costs of petrol and diesel.

> If that sounds like the view of an old jaded cynic then that's because it
> is.
> It also happens to be the truth.
>
> A W-S
>
>

It happens that the biggest investors in the newer fuel technologies are the
larger oil companies. Trouble is their work is most likely to be buried
until such time as they can no longer make easy profits from the oil. Not
that it matters a bit for as the tax income from the oil goes down the
various governments will increase the tax take from the alternative fuels.
--

Frae Bob Peffers,
Kelty,
Fife,
Scotland, (UK).
--

Frae Bob Peffers,
Kelty,
Fife,
Scotland, (UK).


.