Monday 28 October 2013

Support for Temple Hill

The application for Temple Hill Wind Farm has  been submitted, validated and is on South Kesteven Council’s website.

Obviously any support is subject to the details of the application so please view those here SKDC planning   application number  S13/2699.

 There is a well organised and vociferous campaign against this project. As with most anti wind groups they complain bitterly about the wind industry "propaganda" but then continue to produce deliberately misleading and spurious "facts" to galvanise local support. 
        
        The Revolt group have this  to say about wind turbine efficiency. http://re-volt.co.uk/the-issues/wind-energy-viability/

"We won’t go into all the details (though if you’d like to know the maths please email us!) but the basic answer is NO. The huge development at Temple Hill would only power around 800 kettles."
I would suggest that most people would consider this an insignificant amount, I mean a kettle is only on for a couple of minutes isn't it?
Well no..is this case they mean 800 kettles on 24 hrs every day 365 days a year, not very helpful comparison really is it? I mean who is going to keep topping up the water and changing the elements when they burn out?:)
 Furthermore their 800 kettles should actually be  nearer 1600 permanently boiling kettles  as they have managed to get even this simple calculation wrong ( no wonder they don't want to go into details).
Here is a guide to calculating possible power output from a wind farm.
Maximum power rating of a turbine = (e.g.) 2.5MW
Anticipated total power produced over a year = 25% of rated capacity (load factor)
Therefore over a year with the turbine sometimes running flat out and sometimes not running at all you can expect to average out 625Kw of electricity produced for every hour of the year. So that's 625 Kw/h multiplied by 8760 hrs in a year = 5,475,000 Kw/h p.a.
If you have 5 of these turbines you could realistically produce 27,375,000 Kw/h p.a.
The average kettle requires 2kw of power so if one was on permanently for a year it would use up 2 x 8760 or 17520 Kw/h of electricity ( incidentally the average UK household uses 4700 Kw/h p.a.)
So if you were daft enough to use up all of the output from the turbines to boil kettles you would power  1562.5 kettles (27,375,000 total Kw/h divided by 17520 Kw/h per kettle) almost double the number Revolt are offering as a "fact".
Please register your support for this scheme. Don't let the scare tactics of a misguided few be the only words the planning department have to consider.