Carbon footprints – wind turbines – letter from West Cumbria 2

Happy New Year from the frozen North.

I have blogged at length on the fact that wherever I go in Cumbria I can see a wind turbine or 2 or 3 or more. I actually quite like windmills and I also am a supporter of energy from renewable sources – 1 of them being ‘the wind’. I think we need a mix of energy sources and our UK government for some reason has dubbed West Cumbria ‘Britain’s Energy Coast’ – (the cynic in me also sees this as a cloak for ‘The World’s Nuclear Waste Dump’). I also wonder why the Cumbria based Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (the NDA) doesn’t  just call itself ‘The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority’ and have done with it.
I digress and refer the reader to previous blogs.

So: …cutting from www.overberg.co.zaBack to my point for discussion and comparison – wind turbines.

Currently Cumbria has 200 turbines and to make Cumbria energy self sufficient, using just wind, we would need some 2,000 more. 
The visual impact of 2,200 wind turbines scattered over the most beautiful county in England is……well… It just won’t happen – will it?

However if we are to keep down carbon emissions and control temperature rise to less then 2degC we need to have a mix: nuclear, tidal, hydro, wind and solar and bio-fuels of course. The mix is really dependant on what is available and, for Cumbria, that seems to be water (tide and hydro), wind, bio-fuels (and nuclear).
For the Western Cape it’s got to be solar, wind, bio-fuels and nuclear.

I’ve googled some statistics and my web-based research reveals the following:

• The Western Cape is approx 22 times bigger than Cumbria.
• The Overberg (4,340 sq miles) is 2 times the size of Cumbria.
• Cumbria has a population of 500,000 compared to 220,000 in the Overberg i.e. Cumbria although one of the most sparsely populated parts of Britain has more than 4 times the density of the Overberg
• Now here’s a beauty: Cumbria gets 23million day/night visits a year; compared to 1.1million to the Overberg (or 15million to the Western Cape).
• Based on population the Overberg could stand another 1million or so visitors – can we/you cope??

Trying to find sensible energy requirements and usage is much more difficult. Cumbria, though similarly rural, is more industrialised than the Overberg and of course … much colder. The best I can work out is as follows:

• Cumbria needs 25TerawattHours per annum
• The Overberg will need less even pro-rata so I assume backing off the industrial/developed apportionment that it should be approx. 8 Terawatt Hours per annum
• 600 wind turbines in a field near Botrivier should just about do it.
• The 100 MW plant proposed by Eskom is only about 40 Turbines….. so think about that.
• The Nuclear plant at Koeberg is an 18 times bigger producer of electricity than the 100MW wind plant but still only produces 6% of SA’s energy needs.

We all have to do something to control temperature rise:

• use less – spend less - compromise
• burn less coal – or move to clean coal
• use solar
• use the wind
• use the tides
• Use bio-fuels
• use the hydro schemes
• use safe nuclear

My next letter will be on a different subject..Water again!