There has been some discussion on wind turbines on the forum recently, thought this would be of interest:
http://www.bwea.com/
Ignoring the fact that Anita Roderick supports it, I think this is good.
Apparently we are the windiest country in Europe, with 40% of Europe's wind resources. This is enough to meet our current electricity needs several times over. By 2005, the wind projects in existance and currently being built will meet 1.3% of the UK's electricity requirements by producing 4.49TWh per year.
Personally, I would gladly pay a few pence extra per kWh if we were generating it all with wind, solar and tidal.
Annual electricity consumption here is 343.8TWh. According to the BWEA websitewe can produce several times our electricity requirements. So let's assume that means a wind-production of 1000TWh. Thus giving us a deficite of about 650TWh. What if we could use this to power cars? Well, a car uses about 7.5kW to drive along at a steady speed. This was a US website, thus probably referred to a large car. With regenerative braking you reclaim some of the energy used in acceleration. So let's say 8.5kW as an average power use. Cars drive on average 10,000 miles per year. At an average speed of 40mph, that is 250 hours. So, 250 x 8.5 = 2125kWh per year.
The energy overproduction we took to be 650TWh per year.
650 trillion / 2125 thousand = 305 million cars. This assumes 100% efficiency on everything, which obviously is rubbish. But still, provided the whole system is more than 10% efficient we can have electric cars (either through batteries or fuel cells, the electricity is used to electrolyse hydrogen out of water) as well as meet all of our electricity requirements including trains and factories!
http://www.bwea.com/
A new campaign launched today shows that the majority of the population - 74% - agree that wind farms are necessary to help meet current and future energy needs in the UK, despite a vocal campaign against their expansion.
Ignoring the fact that Anita Roderick supports it, I think this is good.
Apparently we are the windiest country in Europe, with 40% of Europe's wind resources. This is enough to meet our current electricity needs several times over. By 2005, the wind projects in existance and currently being built will meet 1.3% of the UK's electricity requirements by producing 4.49TWh per year.
Personally, I would gladly pay a few pence extra per kWh if we were generating it all with wind, solar and tidal.
Annual electricity consumption here is 343.8TWh. According to the BWEA websitewe can produce several times our electricity requirements. So let's assume that means a wind-production of 1000TWh. Thus giving us a deficite of about 650TWh. What if we could use this to power cars? Well, a car uses about 7.5kW to drive along at a steady speed. This was a US website, thus probably referred to a large car. With regenerative braking you reclaim some of the energy used in acceleration. So let's say 8.5kW as an average power use. Cars drive on average 10,000 miles per year. At an average speed of 40mph, that is 250 hours. So, 250 x 8.5 = 2125kWh per year.
The energy overproduction we took to be 650TWh per year.
650 trillion / 2125 thousand = 305 million cars. This assumes 100% efficiency on everything, which obviously is rubbish. But still, provided the whole system is more than 10% efficient we can have electric cars (either through batteries or fuel cells, the electricity is used to electrolyse hydrogen out of water) as well as meet all of our electricity requirements including trains and factories!