Re: Wind Farms.
I think Realist makes some excellent points for all manner of nature provided energy, whether it be by the wind, sun or sea. It's virtually free energy with just the cost of initial building, installation and maintenance to be accounted for.
In the village where I live, at the time of building, we had the largest coal fired power station in Europe. There have since appeared other coal fired stations such as Ferrybridge, Eggborough and Drax. They are sitting on the largest seams of coal in the British Isles. In fact, those seams of coal stretch across the North Sea to Germany.
It was once suggested that our miners were contributing to the war effort by nicking Hitlers Coal....
However, is it jobs you want to create by running coal fired stations? Miners, Transport, Engineers, all pushing up the cost of electricity. Or cheap virtually maintenance free power generation? Add to this the amount of land required to store coal supplies to the station, the amount of land required to store the ash produced, and the damage to the environment caused by the extraction of thousands of gallons of river water on a daily basis to cool the generation process. Not to mention the endless stream of Lorries, Barges and goods trains to feed the beast.
Since the station closed in the nineties the whole area has been turned into a massive nature reserve, even the threat of building a Gas Powered Station (which I agree with) would take up a fraction of the land and provide the least disturbance, and only requiring a handful of maintenance engineers. The gas would enter by pipes underground and would not produce burnt material needing to be stored and disposed of. Although natural gas will not last forever, so would eventually have to be imported and paid for.
Quite ironic really that the massive coal burning, energy producing, nature destroying leviathan of the past should leave a legacy to nature where it once stood.....