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Saturday 9 November 2024

Static



This morning found Mrs H and I driving down the A610 in the direction of the M1, on our way to buy a particular Christmas present. There is a wind turbine quite close to the road, which this morning had static blades due to a lack of wind.

Nothing unusual about that, we haven’t had much wind for many days. Overcast, grey and cold weather has been hanging around our bit of Derbyshire for at least a week. Feels like months, but it isn't.

Thousands of drivers must have seen those static blades and it must be a common enough sight elsewhere in the country whenever the wind speed is inadequate to turn the blades. It suggests an interesting question though – does the sight of static wind turbine blades create a widespread perception that these things are not a reliable way to generate electricity?

Anyone can work this weakness out for themselves, we know that, but does the casual and occasionally repeated sight of static wind turbine blades enter the popular perception of them? Some people mention it and some don’t, but does it become a feature automatically recalled whenever the subject is of sustainable energy is raised?

A widespread, lurking mistrust perhaps, much larger than sustainability fans realise. A lurking perception that Ed Miliband and his ilk are not even as trustworthy as those wind turbines. Let us hope so. 

10 comments:

dearieme said...

We were once in a German electric train crossing the North European Plain. The wind turbines were static. Then I noticed an occasional twitch. The penny dropped: it was a response to vortex shedding by the train. In other words the twitches were powered, indirectly, by the electricity grid.

A K Haart said...

dearieme - I had to look up vortex shedding but it would be as well not to tell Ed Miliband, he'll think it's a way to keep the blades turning.

Sam Vega said...

Whenever you see them working, big forests of them, there are always a few that are not turning at all. Broken or under repair, they are another reminder that things never live up to the initial promise.

There are none where we live, but the last few days have been very dark, grey, and completely windless. There's a joke here somewhere about Miliband's Millibars, but I'll leave the raw materials with you scientists to do something with.

A K Haart said...

Sam -
The Millibars are on me
The Millibar Kid is strong and tough
Only Net Zero is good enough...

No it doesn't really work, needs more thought.

Peter MacFarlane said...

Also remember, the ones turning very slowly when there’s no wind are actually being powered from the grid, in order to avoid damage to the bearings.

A K Haart said...

Peter - I've read about that and I've certainly seen them turning very slowly when there seems to be no wind.

dearieme said...

An acquaintance of mine decided to work on wave power decades ago. His logic was that wind power was a preposterously silly idea but that wave power might work.

A K Haart said...

dearieme - some decades ago I remember wave power being in the news because of a device called Salter's Duck. I still recall being disappointed when it ran into problems and faded from the headlines.

Peter MacFarlane said...

Wave power has never come to much because the environment is just too aggressive; no mechanical device can endure for long, especially in salt water. Tidal power is a more useful idea, but the problem as ever is scale. To be genuinely useful, it turns out we need twenty Severn Estuaries, or fifty Corryvreckans, or something like that. And even those places are hardly gentle to engineering. Forget the lot of it and crack on with the SMR’s!

A K Haart said...

Peter - I agree, crack on with SMR. We should have seen the need to go nuclear decades ago and many did, but we saddled ourselves with party politics and it doesn't work.