To become climate neutral until 2040 the state of Bavaria needs to build 104 wind turbines every year. With the first quarter of 2024 coming to an end we should be at 26 turbines. To keep track of the actual progress, Greenpeace has installed a counter in the Munich city center. Below is a picture I took today of the counter
#Renewableenergy is approaching an important possible inflection point... what happens when #windfarms reach the end of their (expected) technical lifespan?
Do owners of early windframs (often in prime wind locations) invest in upgraded & now much more efficient (if expensive) new installations, or will they walk away having already earned a return... & if the latter, what happens with those sites; will they remain wind farms ?
This may become the key Q. for #windpower this decade.
#greenwashing#WindFarms#Conseravation#Scotland#Sutherland#Peatlands#salmon#Rivers
Another day ,another wind farm application,this time for the opposite side of the local salmon river to the application put on a couple of years back that was turned down for environmental reasons ,It looks like the one planned on peatlands has been turned down and our ancient monuments,bats eagles and other wildlife there are safe.Its like being under siege,hopefully we will get the UNESCO status soon
The #UK produced enough #renewable energy to power all its homes in 2023
Jack Loughran
January 3, 2024
"UK-based renewables generated over 90TWh of energy in 2023, which is more than enough to power all of the UK’s 28 million homes, an analysis has found.
[...]
"There are also several large new #WindFarms in the pipeline such as an £11bn 3GW project led by Germany’s RWE and UAE’s Masdar, which followed the opening of #Scotland’s largest offshore #WindFarm yet in October."
#Vattenfall (one of the UK's largest #offshoreWind operators), after having suspended work on future projects due to costs (and the structure of Govt. licences), has sold three East coast offshore #windfarms to RWE.
As the FT points out this suggests very different assessment of the UK #windenergy sector.
Its just a pity, its being passed from one non-UK investor to another.... where are the major UK investors when this major infrastructure investment came available?
Greenpeace offices and activists worldwide have worked to protect whales and the oceans they call home for decades. We’re also massive fans of renewables, which we need to build a tonne of to phase out gas and coal and tackle the climate emergency.
So when we started seeing posts online claiming offshore wind farms were killing whales, we decided to investigate.
The short answer: no, offshore wind farms aren’t killing whales.
The longer answer is a little bit more complicated – but building offshore wind is way, way better for ocean wildlife than fossil fuels, especially offshore gas and oil.
Projects hijacked by ‘political actors like Peter Dutton suddenly pretending to care about whales’.
Associate professor Michelle Voyer was startled to see an article from the internationally esteemed academic journal Marine Policy asserting that wind energy projects proposed for the waters off the Illawarra and Hunter Valley would kill 400 whales a year pop up on social media.
After all Voyer lives in the Illawarra, and due to her role as principal fellow with the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security at the University of Wollongong, she has expertise in the field. She is also, it turns out, associate editor of Marine Policy. She did not recognise the article.
@Hypx Get real!
Do you really believe the Chinese invested billions in their #Solar industry with no plan?
Do you really believe Europe poured billions in #WindFarms without a plan?
Do you really believe Elon built his super charging network haphazardly?
Again, get real!
If you want to develop any #Hydrogen use case you need a big upfront investment. Good luck convincing investors for those cases where a more economically viable carbon free alternative is already on the market.
Without any plan.
The first turbine to be completed in a project to build the world’s largest offshore windfarm, in the North Sea, has begun powering British homes and businesses.
Dogger Bank, which sits off the coast of Yorkshire, started producing power as the first of 277 turbines was connected to the electricity grid.
The project will produce 3.6 gigawatts of power, enough for 6m homes, when it is completed in 2026.
Hard as it may be to believe, since April SSE's #windfarms have been under-performning by around a fifth in the #energy fed into the national grid.
The claim is that 'adverse weather conditions' reduced their ability to generate #windpower... by which I assume they mean not windy enough?
Of course, we cannot know how realistic or otherwise their projections were (they may have been hyped for #investment purposes?), but as a #cyclist in the NW, let me tell you its been windy enough here!
Again one has to wonder why foreign investors often seem keener to invest in UK #GreenTransition than UK investors?
(a couple of decades down the track will this be the #water sector all over again, I wonder, with accusations of lack of continued investment & rent seeking? Time will tell)
Once again #MichaelGove opens his mouth & offers much hot air and little of any substance (this time on onshore #windfarms & #planning
As Alethea Warrington, from climate charity Possible puts it: 'The minor changes announced today are nowhere close to enough to unblock wind. Today’s small step forward leaves new onshore wind in England still facing higher planning barriers than anything else, including new coalmines & it will still be too difficult for communities which want wind to get it'!
How offshore wind-to-hydrogen could help fill Europe’s clean energy demand.
So-called green hydrogen, produced through electrolysis of water using renewable energy, currently accounts for only about 1% of global production. It is also about three times as expensive as its grey counterpart, produced from fossil fuel sources.
Are floating turbines and electrolysers a solution to scaling green hydrogen?
John Burn-Murdoch (FT) observes that NIMBYs are able to use the planning system in the US & UK to impose costs on #infrastructure development through delay & required changes to projects.
He calls this a tax on infrastructure that reduces such investment in both countries.
Certainly, we have seen this in the UK with the difficulties of onshore #windfarms shifting investment to more expensive offshore locations.
We need the politics of infrastructure needs to be more national & less local!
There's always some (local) reason not to adopt a #green policy (from #ULEZ to #windfarms)... but what seems extraordinary is how little weight is allowed to the #climatecrisis as the counter weight to such considerations.
#RishiSunak talks about a 'proportionate' response... surely the proportionate response would be remake society in the face of the already growing effects of #climatechange.
Its a political myopia of the highest order & something future generations will be disgusted with!
Climate change is an immediate threat to the majority of the world's population.
We need a local, regional, state, national, and international "moon shot" type of concentration of effort using available resources while developing and advancing new science and technologies to counteract the damage humans have caused.
Without this type of all-out, universal cooperation, human civilization, and perhaps humanity itself, are in imminent danger of extinction.
"My personal view is that the change is worth pursuing in the interest of slowing the negative effects on our #ocean#ecosystem that #GlobalWarming and #ClimateChange is having right now. It's not free. It comes at a cost, and that's a trade-off that we have to consider when we decide to put #WindFarms into the #ocean."
Nothing is free, everything has a cost. The perfect is too often the enemy of the good.
Doing Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is what we need, now.
One of the hottest days on planet Earth this week in the past 125,000 years and the hottest since recording started. So harnessing the wind and using that instead of coal or gas is crucial.
Aside from it just making sense, I like how windmills look. To me, they symbolize the possibility we might just move forward.
@Peace_out_art@TonyStark#windfarms are ideal here as fresh westerly breeze from cooler Pacific Ocean inland to hotter Central Valley blow much of the year. From peak on clear day you can see Mt Shasta making it the one location where you can see more of California than from any other place