Technical Issues
The links below cover some of the many technical questions concerning wind power. SHOWT takes no responsibility for the views expressed in these documents, but they make interesting reading.
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- Council for Science and Technology Report on UK Electricity Supply. (May, 2005) The Council for Science and Technology (CST) is the UK government's top-level advisory body on science and technology policy issues.
- Windpower - free lunch or Damocles' sword?, by John Etherington, formerly Reader in Ecology in the University of Wales.This paper shows that the relative quantities of CO2 emission saved, and in global circulation, make it impossible for wind installations significantly to alter atmospheric concentration of CO2 or climate."(PDF)
- Renewable Energy Foundation - "REF encourages the development of renewable energy and energy conservation whilst safeguarding the landscapes of the United Kingdom from unsustainable industrialisation." REF has recently published a major study of CO2 emission reduction from randomly intermittent renewables [eg. wind farms]. By David J. White, Fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineers.
- 'The Dash for Wind - West Denmark’s Experience and UK’s Energy Aspirations', by Hugh Sharman, Incoteco (Denmark) ApS. (PDF file) Interesting examination of the Danish experience of large scale wind power by an energy consultant. Examines the implications of large scale wind power for the UK supply system.
- The Scottish Wind Assessment Project - "An ongoing programme of research which seeks to collate existing studies and commission new research to promote a thorough investigation of the claims made for and against the use of wind-generated energy."
- The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research - 'Ensuring new and renewable energy can meet electricity demand: security of decarbonised electricity systems' (Technical paper 30, 2005). - "The performed capacity adequacy studies for the mid-term future UK electricity scenarios clearly show that the capacity value of wind generation plant is limited. Analysis was carried out for a wide range of wind penetrations to examine the generating capacity of conventional plant that can be displaced by wind, while maintaining a specified security level. We observed that wind generation only displaces a relatively modest amount of conventional plant, which means that in order to maintain the same level of security, a significant capacity of conventional plant will still be required."
- Views of Scotland - States that, "the case for wind power is seriously flawed from a scientific, economic and political perspective. Construction of wind power stations is causing unjustifiable and irreversible damage to some of Scotland’s greatest assets."