Wind farm battle gains new support
A PRESSURE group for common land has joined the battle against plans for 19 wind turbines on Mynydd-y-Gwair common.
Locals are opposing npower's proposal, planned for eight miles north of Swansea, and have been buoyed in their efforts by the Open Spaces Society.
Its general secretary Kate Ashbrook said: "This is a wonderful open hillside, with spectacular views, where people roam freely enjoying the peace, tranquillity and exhilaration of the area.
"The wind turbines, with their associated paraphernalia of tracks, transformers, mast and substation, will urbanise and destroy the wildness of the site.
"This hillside is particularly important, being so close to Swansea. It is the backdoor recreation ground for the city's population."
She said the land was common land, and people had a right to walk and ride horses over all of it, not just on the paths.
Kate said: "The turbines and other works will severely interfere with the public's exercise and enjoyment of its rights, as well as with the rights of commoners to graze animals there."
She added: "A development of this scale on common land ought to be subject to the procedures for exchange land, requiring the developers to offer, in exchange for the common to be taken, land which is just as beneficial to the public.
"That, of course, would be an impossible task and would render the application dead in the water."
npower has said its plans would create sufficient energy to power over 24,000 properties.
It says the development of sites such as Mynydd-y-Gwair is essential if Wales is to meet its targets for reducing carbon emissions and meeting climate change goals.
4 Comments
by Brian Morris, Neath Port Talbot
Tuesday, November 04 2008, 12:24AM
“As a follow up to my previous comments. I have visited the nPower website for this project and have analysed the proposal information namely:
19 Turbines at 2.5MW each
average electricty used by each home is 4700kwh per annum etc
Once you use the Installed Capacity info namely 19 times each turbine capacity = 19 x 2.5MW = 47.5MW or 416.1Mkwh per annum
The expected number of homes to be powered by this wind farm is 28,000.
Therefore 28,000 times 4700kwh per annum = 131.6Mkwh
You can calculate the Capacity Factor or efficiency of for this proposed wind farm site by dividing the expected output by the installed capacity output which is
131.6Mkwh divided by 416.1Mkwh which = 31% efficiency.
As you can see using 19 huge Wind Turbines the overall efficiency for the site is only 31%, I would say that this is a very optimistic efficiency figure and in practice given the location a much lower value should have been used such as 25% which will reduce the number of houses it will support from 28,000 homes to 22,000 homes”
by Brian Morris, Neath Port Talbot
Monday, November 03 2008, 11:48PM
“Lets set the record straight and that is that Wind Turbines are not the answer to the renewable argument for Britain. Yes they are part of it, however because they are so inefficient at converting wind into electricity they should only be used to power remote locations such as Islands.
Because they are so inefficient you need to "cluster" them together into a wind farm. The operational problem with wind turbines is called the "Capacity Factor" and relate to the average wind for the given wind farm site and how efficient the chosen wind turbines are at converting wind into electricity.
Most British locations where they have wind farms have a typical Capacity Factor between 20 and 35% with 35% regarded as the highest in England and Wales, there are some remote locations in Scotland that have 40+% but these site are very few.
So when a proposal is put forward for a multi wind turbine installation that has an "installed capacity" of say 50MW (50 Million Watts) the actual maximum output from the Wind Farm with the most favourable Capacity Factor would be 35% of 50MW which is 17.5MW a lot less than the 50MW and if the site falls into the lower end of the capacity factor reading for a site, that 50MW could be as low as 10MW one fifth of the installed capacity. It¿s the Installed Capacity which tends to be the headline figure given by those proposing the wind farm never the capacity factored output which would be the most likely output for the site. The Installed Capacity (our example 50MW) is also tie with the number of home that the wind farm is suggested it would power, you can now see that the powering of houses figure is also incorrect. It¿s basically marketing by the company who is proposing the wind farm and this incorrect information (installed Capacity and number of houses it will power) is usually followed with technical jargon that is meant to baffles the local Council members. Other technical issues that are never mentioned are:
Because of the variable output from these wind farms, there are problems when they are connected to the electricity Grid and therefore it is a fact that not one single wind turbine or wind turbine farm has replaced an existing coal, oil or gas power station, as these power stations are required when the wind farm output is low.
The National Grid has problems with the balancing of their electricity network because of the variable output from these wind farms.
The energy used in construction of the wind turbines (steel) and the massive concrete foundations mean that each Wind Turbine never actually returns a positive energy return in other words, the energy used to make and install a Wind Turbine means that they never generate enough clean, ¿green¿ electricity to cover what was used to manufacture and install them ¿ now this has to be considered ¿ they never produce enough clean electricity to match the carbon used to make them.
Wind Turbines in Wales are not the answer - if they are to be part of the solution they should be located off shore where they are more efficiently operated.”
by anon, anon
Wednesday, October 29 2008, 1:30PM
“these things are dangerous, I am worried that these giant fans might cause damage with the wind they give off.”
by Rob Smith, Morriston
Monday, October 27 2008, 10:02PM
“As councillor Roger Smith of Clydach supports windfarms in school playing fields perhaps he will agree to having this windfarm in his back garden save spoiling the country side?”