Your recent Word on the Street comments probably reflect the general opinion that wind power is the way forward – because that is what we are told, repeatedly.
This mantra has seeped into the public psyche over the last 10 years, often along with the threat that if we don’t have wind turbines everywhere we will have to have nuclear power stations.
The bad news (that ‘they’ don’t want us to know) is that we will have to have nuclear power stations anyway.
Wind turbines produce pathetic amounts of power in relation to their huge size, and this power is intermittent.
We may well want extra heat and light in the depths of winter, but if it’s a dead calm week with no wind – tough!
The Government target of 20 per cent renewable power is a pipe dream; if it is achieved by plastering turbines all over our countryside, we will still need other power stations to provide for when the wind drops, or a fifth of us are in the dark.
And since nuclear is the only reliable kind of non-CO2 generation… the decision is made for us.
Meanwhile, we opt for wind power. I note that one of your ‘streeters’ says: “Windfarms should be built well away from housing in rural areas.” Good for him – maybe he’s heard that a farming family from Deeping St Nicholas have had to abandon their (now worthless) farmhouse because of the ‘unbearable’ noise problems from the neighbouring wind farm.
France is now calling for a 2km buffer zone between turbines and homes and this call is being taken up around the world as more problems (previously ‘smothered’ by big wind companies) are coming out into the open.
Miriam Crouch
Dunsby Fen,
Bourne
25 June 2008
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2008/06/26/wind-farm-mantra-hides-the-fact-that-well-need-nuclear-power-stations-too/