Useless, bird-mincing monstrosities
Northumberland Gazette, www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk 13 January 2012
Northumberland Gazette, www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk 13 January 2012
Your correspondent Bridget Gubbins (Gazette letters, last week) equates the two wind turbines at Cramlington to angels, which is not quite how I would describe such useless bird mincing monstrosities.
To generate one giga-watt of electricity using wind turbines, with the wind blowing at a constant 30mph, requires 2,500 square kilometres of land.
Whereas one nuclear power station, eg Hartlepool, generates 1.3 giga-watt using only a few acres.
The county of Northumberland extends to 5,013 square kilometres. Let us accept that wind turbines cannot be built in towns and villages, in rivers and lakes, on roads and reservoirs and for engineering reasons on Cheviot, Hedgehope, Windygyle and most of the other border hills.
It would therefore not be possible, using every other piece of land, to replicate with wind turbines here in Northumberland, the output of a single nuclear power station.
If, as propaganda informs us, carbon dioxide is a pollutant (and not, as I was taught at school, a trace gas essential for life on earth and a fertilizer of our green and pleasant land), then it is long past time serious thought be given to some other means of reliable carbon-free power generation.
The erection of countless undependable turbines in this county would be the death knell of tourism and the comprehensive destruction of one of England’s last wildernesses, the indispensable hundreds of miles of access roads and transmission lines would then complete the plunder.
Bill Ricalton,
Longhorsley
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2012/01/13/useless-bird-mincing-monstrosities/