Rats. There goes some future business

Not promoting wind power or saying England is wrong, but I thought the northern part of England/Wales had pretty constant winds?
 

Clem72

Well-Known Member
I knew the wind power industry was built on shaky ground, but we've been making good money on it, so... :whistle:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/06/england-giving-up-on-wind-power.php

Were you doing business in the UK? I always felt that wind should be more popular than the other renewables (solar, wave, geothermal) as it's based on pretty old technology. But I guess it just doesn't scale as well, and the areas with the most wind are not coincidentally remote from the places people like to live. So power line losses and hardware issues and people who don't like to look at windmills seem to conspire to drag down what at least on paper should be the best renewable option.
 

Gilligan

#*! boat!
PREMO Member
Were you doing business in the UK? I always felt that wind should be more popular than the other renewables (solar, wave, geothermal) as it's based on pretty old technology. But I guess it just doesn't scale as well, and the areas with the most wind are not coincidentally remote from the places people like to live. So power line losses and hardware issues and people who don't like to look at windmills seem to conspire to drag down what at least on paper should be the best renewable option.

Are doing business in the UK..one of the largest end-users for the wind Farm support vessels we help produce. I'm headed to Taiwan later this month to put yet another vessel in commission, for a British operating company. We're building the third in a series in Norway right now too, and it is also headed to the UK for service.

The handwriting has always been on the wall...nobody was betting on the success of the technology once the subsidies are gone.
 

Gilligan

#*! boat!
PREMO Member
Not promoting wind power or saying England is wrong, but I thought the northern part of England/Wales had pretty constant winds?

More powerful and more consistent than anything we've got in the eastern half of the country...including offshore. That's the rub...wind power is a debacle almost everywhere. The only reason it exists really, is because it is the darling of the non-technical left and those that are making huge sums of money off the the various subsidies that keep it alive.
 

glhs837

Power with Control
Ah, that magic word, subsidy. The beloved equalizer of the left. "If only we subsidize X, it will soon be able to compete with nasty ol' Y". 30 years of govt spent money later, "Well, if we just spent more, it will surely work this time".
 

Gilligan

#*! boat!
PREMO Member
Ah, that magic word, subsidy. The beloved equalizer of the left. "If only we subsidize X, it will soon be able to compete with nasty ol' Y". 30 years of govt spent money later, "Well, if we just spent more, it will surely work this time".

Something else to consider as everyone continues to fawn over the deficient technology that is wind power:

1. The UK subsidies have been and are quite substantial...in most cases well exceeding the various subsidies provided here in US (they vary from state to state here..fortunately Marty's doomed-to-fail flirtation with wind power seems to have been mercifully terminated).

2. The consumer cost of electricity is significantly higher in the UK than here...so the revenue per KW-hour is greater.

And yet it is still an economic failure.
 
Top