• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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A post on Mikado a few days ago making out that wind power was some form of conspiracy to destroy our countryside and to make money for large faceless corporations without giving us anything in return has spurred me on to put together an organised argument showing why wind power is a good thing for the world in general and for Ireland in particular.

OK, before I get into the bones of this post I think I should explain my involvement in the wind industry. I am not and have never been an employee of any wind energy company but my father works for one and runs a few and has been involved in the wind industry for quite some time now. He started off developing wind farms part-time in the evenings and was so good at it that he was snapped up by a major European wind turbine company and since then he has been with a number of large wind turbine manufacturers. Because dad is so involved in the wind industry I get to tour many of the wind farms in Ireland at various stages of development and building as well as when they are operational. Also, when dad was still doing this stuff part-time and when I was still in school I used to help him with the development work (which usually involved getting very cold and very wet on a mountain somewhere) from time to time so I have some hands-on experience of the industry too. So, now that you know where I’m coming from we can continue!

There are a lot of common arguments against wind power that you often hear and I will go through them one by one later in this post but I’ll just start by giving you my view of ‘the big picture’. At the moment, we as a society, are heavily dependent on energy and the resources we currently get the majority of that energy from are finite and running out. So something has to give. Either we stop using energy or we start developing other sources of energy that will not run out. Wind is not THE answer but it is part of the answer. There is no one source of energy that could power the whole world, a good energy grid is diverse so that a problem with one source does not cripple the grid. A grid powered by all wind would be ludicrous, as would a grid powered by all solar or all biomass or all hydro or all anything. Basically, diversity in the grid is a good thing and since the wind is totally free and always blowing somewhere in the world it should be tapped as part of our overall energy strategy. Ireland is perfectly placed to tap this resource so it should!

So, what are the common arguments against wind power? Well lets start with the most common one:

Wind farms should be stopped because they are a blight on the landscape are are spoiling the countryside.

Firstly, many people actually LIKE the look of wind turbines! Personally I think there is something very elegant and graceful about them and I think they add to the landscape. There are people who disagree with that though and that is their right. However, these people who think wind turbines are ugly will probably agree that they are less ugly than fossil fuel buring power plants or Nuclear power plants. Also, each turn of those blades is reducing the amount of CO₂ we are pumping into the air where as the never ending flow of smoke from the chimneys of fossil fuel burning plants increase our damage to the environment each second they are in operation. Another important point to note is that agricultural life just caries on as normal below wind turbines so they just become a part of the land rather than taking it over like a large fossil fuel or Nuclear plant does. Wind turbines are in tune with the country, large power plants are NOT!

It is fair to say that areas of outstanding natural beauty like the Burren or Glendalough should not be used for wind farms no matter how ideal the conditions. No one with any sense could argue with that. Likewise wind turbines should not be placed in the path of migrating birds or in areas where their foundations would cause major damage to the environment. Luckily the planning service in this country is not so inept as to just grant permission for wind farms willy-nilly, they ensure that environmental impact studies are done and that their recommendations are enforced and that wind farms are built in such a way as to minimise their visual impact.

Finally, the future of large scale wind energy in Ireland is probably off-shore. Turbines that are off-shore are out of the way and except in excellent conditions, out of sight too. They also get steady sustained winds and assuming they are built sensibly and bearing in mind the local geology and ecology they will not harm any one or anything but just give us clean power.

I think the best way to illustrate my views on this point is with some pictures! All the images used in this post are of power plants and wind farms in Ireland (including the North). First I’ll show you some images of fossil fuel burning power plants in Ireland and then some images of Irish wind farms.

Moneypoint (coal burning 915MW)

West Offaly Power (peat buring 150MW)

Tarbert Power Station (oil burning 620MW)

Poolbeg (oil & gas burning 1,020MW)

Now, lets compare that to some Irish wind farms.

Kingsmountain (25MW with 10 2.5MW turbines)

Meentycat (75MW with 38 turbines of various sizes)

Tappaghan (19.5MW with 13 1.5MW turbines)

Arklow Bank (25MW with 7 3.6MW turbines)

Wind Turbines generate almost no power

In the very early days of the wind industry there was some truth to this statement, the technology was still very primitive so as well as the turbines having low power ratings they were also very inefficient and hence generally produced very little power so you needed LOADS of them (like you see in California) to make them even remotely worth while. Thing is the wind industry now has some serious capital behind it so the turbines have come on in leaps and bounds in the last 10 years.

The power ratting of the turbines is literally 10 times higher now than it was 10 years ago but more importantly than that the efficiency of the machines has been massively improved by innovations such as variable pitch blades, variable speed rotors and an increase in sheer scale with larger rotors up higher in better air.

Again, looking at Ireland, the largest turbines we have now are the 3.6MW turbines on Arklow bank. Ten years ago we didn’t even have 0.3MW turbines here yet because 0.2MW turbines were considered top of the line back then. 3.6MW is BIG and I will use that for my calculations but I will point out that the large turbine manufacturers are now working on 5MW and even 6MW turbines so just imagine where we will be in 10 years!

So, 3.5MW, what does that really mean? Well, firstly, no machine produces power at it’s rated capacity at all times so assuming your turbines are on a good site (and lets face it why put them anywhere else!) with reliable 10m/s winds a cautious estimate for that machine’s average efficiency over a year would be 80% so in the space of one year that machine would produce a little over 24GW/h (GigaWatt/Hours). To put that into perspective, 24GWh/ is 24,000Units of electricity and according to the ESB the total demand in the Republic of Ireland in 2001 was 24,221 GW/h. In other words, it would only take 1,000 wind turbines to power the whole country! Seems like wind turbines produce PLENTY of power to me!

Wind turbines save very little CO₂ emission

The argument goes a long the lines of "wind turbines have to be manufactured and the wind farm built and that results in CO₂ emissions so they are not that clean". This is a really stupid argument because ALL power plants have to be built so ALL power plants will result in the emission of CO₂ while they are under construction. However, the moment a wind farm is switched on it stops producing any CO₂ emissions and each Watt of power it produces results in zero CO₂ emissions. Contrast that to any fossil fuel burning plant and even if you assume that the construction of a huge power station results in no more CO₂ emission than the building of a wind farm (something I don’t buy for a second) they start off at the same point as a wind farm but each and every single Watt of power produced results in more CO₂ being emitted into the atmosphere!

There are some nice statistics on the CO₂ emissions savings of wind energy on the Airtricity web site. In case you are not familiar with them Airtricity are an Irish green energy company that produce all their power from wind energy. The quote below is form their front page:

Airtricity has saved the release of 1,988,918 Tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere since 1st January 2003.
This is equivalent to taking 473,552 cars off the road for a year!

This seems like an exceptionally significant saving in CO₂ emissions to me and that is just from one company!

Wind farms make money for large corporations

Of course they do! ALL large scale energy production is run by big business because only big business CAN do things at such a large scale! An individual industrial standard wind turbine costs well over a million Euro so when you consider the cost of developing and building an entire wind farm you can see why only big business can take on such projects.

I think the people who go on about this have the twisted view that all large companies are evil and therefore since all large wind projects are done by big business wind farms are evil. This is just rubbish. Give me GE Wind over Exon any day!

Wind turbines could never power the whole country

Yes, this argument DOES seem laughable but I was actually presented with it on a Mikado thread so I figured I’d include it here.

No, wind farms could never provide ALL our power but that does not mean that they cannot provide ANY of our power! Like I said in my intro, a good power grid has lots of variety so my answer to this argument is "so what???".

Links

• The ESB – www.esb.ie
• Airtricity – www.airtricity.com
• GE Wind – www.gewindenergy.com

I saw an absolutely stunning rainbow on the way from Cavan to Maynooth today. It was complete and vividly bright at both legs. For a while there was also a secondary bow around it and you could clearly see that the colours on the outer bow are in the reverse of the colours of the inner one. If you’re curious as to why that is checkout the section on rainbows at my favorite Atmospheric Optics site. I also saw some amazing Crepuscular rays about half an hour later.

Tagged with: atmospheric optics • observation log

AOL have released the soundtrack to the new Harry Potter film (The Goblet of Fire) on their website. You can only listen to it online because it doesn’t go one sale till the 15th of November but if you have broad band this is well worth a listen now.

The URL is: http://music.aol.com/artist/main.adp?tab=album&albumid=802181

I’m listening to it as I type this and my first impressions are very good. The music is very different because it is by Patrick Doyle this time where as the previous three were by John Williams but it seems to work well and there are haunting echoes of the old themes like Hedwig’s Theme in the new music so we do have some consistency.

I’ll make another post when I’ve had time to properly digest it!

I am well aware that tables for layout are a BAD BAD idea and have stopped using them for such perverted things years ago with just one exception, forms. I started doing my forms in lists because IMO that makes sense but clients were always grumpy when web forms weren’t layed out in the traditional two column way and short of creating a mess of Divs I always ended up falling back to tables for forms. Not anymore! I’ve FINALLY found a nice way of doing forms so that the XHTML is simple, elegant and more importantly, semantically correct while still keeping to a nice two column layout.

Read more

Tagged with: HTML • CSS • web design

Just saw in the news today that Bishops are to be allowed to make up their own mind on withholding Holy Communion from politicians they don’t think are towing the Catholic line.

Way to cheapen a sacrament, pull the church further into politics and generally make the church seem like a bunch of children. "No, you can’t express an opinion we disagree with or we will deny you sacraments", sounds awfully like "It’s my ball and if you don’t pretend to agree with me I’m going home".

Yet again the RCC falls FAR short of the Christian ideal. Does this kind of petty thing seem like the kind of thing Jesus would do? Not to me it doesn’t. Christ went out of his way to embrace sinners and show how much he loved them, he certainly did not shun them and deny them his love.

Yet again I get a strong urge to shout "I told you so" to all those people who said Ratty "would not be that bad".

I got thinking about this after reading an entry on The Daily WTF which described a meeting in which a cocky young graduate was giving a solid old programmer the blame for something that was not his fault. The old programmer printed the raw data his code was receiving to show that the problem was "upstream" of him (with the young graduate's stuff). When the young graduate saw the data he insisted he knew what the problem was, letters were getting mixed in with the numbers by the old programmer. The old hand pointed out that this was called HEX and was a way of presenting binary data. The young graduate refused to believe that and insisted that was rubbish! The fact that someone could graduate from a CS degree without having heard about HEX is bad but what really got me thinking was a reply by a reader who insisted this post was a hoax because it was just not possible to graduate from any CS course anywhere without knowing about HEX. I thought about that for a second and came to the conclusion that I would have no problem believing that there are graduates from my college (NUI Maynooth) out there now who have no idea what HEX is! Read more

Well, tomorrow is the big day. Saddam goes on trial in a special court set up by the Americans with judges appointed by the Americans. As Chiggy put it to me today "there are marsupials in the building". I have to say I agree with him that this stinks of being a Kangaroo court rather than a fair trial.

Now, the simple fact is that I don’t believe for a second Saddam is NOT guilty of crimes against humanity, you just have to see what he did to the Kurds after they rebelled at the end of the last war and to what happens people who spoke out against Saddam in his Iraq.

However, if you are going to try the man to show how much your society has advanced since he was gone and to justify killing the man perhaps you should actually live up to the standards you claim to have now and give the man a fair trial rather than a trial orchestrated by the Americans.

The people of Iraq should be running this trial, not the Americans and the people of Iraq should have decided how they wanted the trial to operate, what charges they wish to bring and who the judges should be. Saddam should also be given all the same rights as any other person in the Iraqi justice system.

Now, do we CARE that this is a kangaroo court? The man is obviously and evil bastard so he doesn’t deserve a real trial. Perhaps but I would argue that NOT giving Saddam a fair trial cheapens the new Iraq and is an insult to the people of Iraq. I say give the man a fair trial, not because he deserves it but because the new Iraq deserves not to be cheapened and sullied by a kangaroo court.

I’ve just missed two days of work and I may miss more because of an illness that has been around probably since the dawn of time, you’d think we’d have figured something out by now! We can go to the moon and wipe out entire continents with a single bomb but we still can’t cure the common cold.

Mind you if this birdflue thing turns out quite as bad as people are suggesting it might then maybe the common cold won’t seem quite so bad anymore.

OK, so you have a telescope and a collection of eyepieces ranging from 6mm up to 45mm but you have no idea how much the bloody things will magnify! Welcome to my world. I keep on forgetting how to do the calculation and what the focal lengths of the Astro2 telescopes are!

One might ask, ‘why are eyepieces labeled with focal lengths instead of magnifications?’. I mean it would be much easier if they did that, right? Unfortunately they can’t because the magnification is not just a function of the eyepiece but also of the focal length of the telescope it is used in. Hence, the same eyepiece will give a different magnification on different telescopes.

Astro2 have the use of two telescopes so that means that there are two focal lengths I’m going to have to start remembering:

• Meade 10" LX200 – 2,500mm
• Meade ETX90 – 1,250mm

Now that we have the focal lengths of the telescopes, how do we get the magnifications for each of the eyepieces?

M = f_o/f_e

Where f_o is the focal length of the objective (i.e. the telescope) and f_e is the focal length of the eye piece (make sure the two are in the same units, usually mm).

This means that the eyepiece I use most often for Astro2 events (26mm) gives a magnification of 96X on the big LX200 and 48X on the little ETX90. It also means that the maximum we can magnify for Astro2 events is about 415X and the minimum is about 60X with the LX200 and 30X with the ETX90.

Mind you it should be pointed out that there is a limit to how far you can magnify with any scope till the image quality just gets too poor to use and that maximum is approximately the diameter of the primary lens/mirror in mm so for the LX200 that gives us an optimum magnification of 250X (i.e. about a 10mm eye-piece) and for the ETX90 about 90X (i.e. about a 13mm eye piece).

At the moment Mars is making it’s closest approach to Earth for the next 18 years so Astro2 thought this was too good a chance to miss! The only slight drawback was that Mars wasn’t well placed for observation from the Physics Observatory until after midnight. However, I offered to run a Mars watch at 1am and to my great surprise I wasn’t alone! There were in fact over 20 other people braving the cold with me!

This was the first opportunity Astro2 had to use the physics department’s LX200 10" telescope. The conditions were not really ideal but we did nonetheless get a good look. We started off with a 15mm eyepiece giving a magnification of about 170X which allowed people to see some surface details while keeping the magnification low enough to keep the image nice and sharp. Once everyone had a look at the low magnification I changed to a 12mm eyepiece to increase the magnification to about 120X. At this stage the sky was getting very hazy and there was a good coating of dew on the corrector plate of the telescope but we could still easily see the black regions on the surface even though the image was quite fuzzy. I did try to up the magnification to about 280X with a 9mm eyepiece but that just wasn’t gonna happen in those conditions!

All in all I think people had a good time and I’m really encouraged by such a high turnout for an Astro2 event at 1am!

Tagged with: Mars • planet • observation log • astronomy

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