Huge swathes of “unspoilt” countryside in the heart of Wales are being threatened by Ed Miliband’s clean power plans, campaigners have warned.
A string of high-voltage power lines are set to be built from the north of the country down to the south as part of a major upgrade of the electricity grid.
The project has been identified as critical for handling energy from the wind turbines that Mr Miliband, the Energy Secretary, wants to deliver across Britain by 2030.
Environmentalism isn’t very good for the environment. You’re surprised, right?
The idea of “unspoilt” countryside is bollocks. Humans and their animals have been changing the environment of the British Isles for seven thousand years. Round where I live was all forest for a few thousand years before 5,000 BCE, then it got chopped down (with stone axes, which must have been tedious) and the cleared land was used for farming, now it’s urban. Things change.
On alternative would be to lay undersea cables to move electricity around. No idea how that would compare in terms of cost though. The usual alternative is to bury the cables but that is more expensive. One study put the life time costs (capital, operating and maintenance) at five times more than simply having standard above ground power lines.
And then there are the materials use – copper, steel, concrete , etc that will be needed for all of this as you have to put the wind turbines in the back end of beyond or in the middle of the sea.
As any Green fule kno
In order to save the planet, you have to destroy it first.
So….. the rows of bird choppers and acres of solar panels are not “despoiling the landscape”?
Funny that…..
@ Salamander
It’s already planned
https://www.cabletechnologynews.co.uk/undersea-electricity-superhighways-that-will-help-deliver-net-zero-move-a-step-closer/
Same as here in East Anglia (ish). All the enviro mentalists up in arms when the consequences of the policies they are quite happy to force down everyone else’s throats, impact upon something they like.
I think we should go nuclear and frack for gas and I’d have no issue with a Nuke being built up the road to my town, nor a Fracking well. But then I really believe what I say.
I was reading the other day that fracking was the way to practical geothermal for places that are not Iceland. Apparently once you get a few tens of metres down the ambient ground temperature remains at around 14ºC and from there you heat-exchange it up to something useful.
So long as the machinery doesn’t make a godawful racket and the end result is vaguely economic I don’t see why this shouldn’t be pursued.
Ah, actually, yes I do.
10s of metres is “ground source heat pump”. Which is indeed v green by current standards. But needs considerable land therefore only the haute boourgoisie can have it.
And if you go far enough down for decent geothermal energy you hit the legal limit for seismic activity. Which you also hit by driving a train.
A cable layer can do over 100 miles a day if it has enough cable. Operating cost about $100,000 per day.
So in theory it must be cheaper than onshore pylons.
The trouble comes when you have to factor in the contract gold plating, protecting the cable from tides or Russians and the rent King Charles may want you to pay.
Buried or undersea cables have recently become much more cost effective. The convertors and inverters using wide bandgap semiconductors are getting cheaper every year. Direct current long distance distribution has much lower losses than alternating current. It is beginning to be used on shorter lines as the costs get lower. The bigger problem will be when the JCB hits a 300kV line rather than a 30kV one.
I was reading the other day that fracking was the way to practical geothermal for places that are not Iceland. Apparently once you get a few tens of metres down the ambient ground temperature remains at around 14ºC and from there you heat-exchange it up to something useful.
And why do you think it remains at around 14°C? Because that’s the balance, at that depth, between the heat coming up from the Earth’s core & what’s being radiated away from the surface. It remains stable because the transfer between source & sink is restricted because the ground is a good thermal insulator. So what’s going to happen if you start drawing on that source of heat? The temperature will fall to a lower balance, depending on how much heat you extract. At best, it’s just a very temporary solution. The thermal capacity per m³ really isn’t very much. Not at 14°C it isn’t. And no, it’s not going to replaced by heat from below. It’s the insulation of the rock keeps it at that temperature. If it didn’t the Earth’s surface would glow red hot.
MG: that was my thought too but we had a power cable laid locally a few years ago for an offshore wind farm in the North Sea. The original planning docs had it as +/- 300kV DC, but when they came to build it, what they actually laid was 220kV 3-phase AC. That’s a much cheaper capital cost as you only have to buy transformers for each end and not rectifier/inverters. However the efficiency in use goes down with the extra inductive & capacitive losses of a long AC system underwater so the costs are loaded onto the users instead. I’m sure the system builders and financiers were well aware of that!
@Addolff Funnily enough they are proposing to build a nuclear site just outside where I grew up, had a few conversations over Christmas with family that are still there, very divided on the issue which is going through public consultation phase
14°C seems to be rather close to the average temperature of the earth’s summit.
I never did understand why human blood runs at 37°C – all that energy needed to get up to and then regulate that higher temperature. You’d think that there’d be an evolutionary edge in running blood at a lower temperature, not just for apes but less energy needed to feed the cows and pigs that we like to eat.
Then I saw MiliEd’s face and realised that low temperature mammals live among us already.
“And if you go far enough down for decent geothermal energy you hit the legal limit for seismic activity. ”
I thought the PTB had exempted geothermal from the seismic limits they set for fracking? I seem to remember reading somewhere that the Eden Project were being allowed limits far laxer than any demanded from fracking wells.
Edit: a bit of googling suggests the limit for fracking was set at events of 0.5 magnitude, when all operations have to cease. Whereas the Eden Project geothermal well had multiple recordable seismic events during drilling (300+) including 3 of c.1.5 but work was only halted briefly and allowed to continue each time after a short hiatus. The project was completed in 2023.
Two tier regulations pre-date TTK by some time…….