Jim Audiomisc
pfm Member
This was prompted by a question on 'Any Questions' I heard on R4 recently, combined with the 'COP'. They were both in Scotland.
I was struck by how backward-looking some of the responses were to the question about 'wind turbines' as a renewable resource and the 'problem' of when the "wind doesn't blow". As an Inguneer who is an IEEE member I've read various recent reports from them about the R&D progress. In parallel I did this simple 'map' based on Crown/Scots legal info wrt the region which Scotland legally can regard as the area over which it has nominal control for economic resources like wind/wave/tidal power.
see http://jcgl.orpheusweb.co.uk/temp/ScotsPower.png
Note that the area is well over 7 times the size of Scotland itself. And is an area where, erm, it is known to generally be 'quite windy'. Also, we know wind blows more at higher levels. And injuneers are already developing wind platforms for deep water, high winds, high level wind, etc. So when we consider what may well be possible 10 years from now if we switched from giving fossil fule cos a *130%* tax break on building huge structures, etc, to search for fossil sources and instead supported develoment of wind/wave/etc over this area. It seems to me utterly crazy now to not to do this rather than foot drag and assume that what we will do 10 - 20 years from now will be as limited as what we've been able to do to date. Wind turbines, etc, continue to develop very rapidly.
Discuss.
I was struck by how backward-looking some of the responses were to the question about 'wind turbines' as a renewable resource and the 'problem' of when the "wind doesn't blow". As an Inguneer who is an IEEE member I've read various recent reports from them about the R&D progress. In parallel I did this simple 'map' based on Crown/Scots legal info wrt the region which Scotland legally can regard as the area over which it has nominal control for economic resources like wind/wave/tidal power.
see http://jcgl.orpheusweb.co.uk/temp/ScotsPower.png
Note that the area is well over 7 times the size of Scotland itself. And is an area where, erm, it is known to generally be 'quite windy'. Also, we know wind blows more at higher levels. And injuneers are already developing wind platforms for deep water, high winds, high level wind, etc. So when we consider what may well be possible 10 years from now if we switched from giving fossil fule cos a *130%* tax break on building huge structures, etc, to search for fossil sources and instead supported develoment of wind/wave/etc over this area. It seems to me utterly crazy now to not to do this rather than foot drag and assume that what we will do 10 - 20 years from now will be as limited as what we've been able to do to date. Wind turbines, etc, continue to develop very rapidly.
Discuss.