{British} Wind power 'ahead of predictions' (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

Onshore wind farms will provide about 5% of Britain's electricity by 2010, according to the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA).
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If this is correct, onshore wind farms will take the government halfway to its target of generating 10% of electricity from renewable sources by 2010.
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The BWEA says that projects already constructed and those already approved will give a capacity of 3,000 megawatts (MW) by 2010.
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Onshore wind farms are more advanced than any other renewable energy sector in Britain, though installation lags well behind some other European countries such as Denmark and Germany.
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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4847054.stm

[Dogmudgeon]

1. Only five percent?

We need to seriously get some growth going in the alt-fuel industry. That's pitiful compared to what we need. We may be at "Peak Oil" right now, and five years away from major energy-shortage shocks. A crippled economy would not be conducive to building new businesses to develop alternative energy.

How about an industry-wide effort to DOUBLE wind/solar/tidal/biofuel power output every THREE years? Is anything like that on the horizon?

--p!

[phantom power]

2. Well, if wind power grew by 43% last year...

that represents about tripling every three years. I don't know if that was in GB.

(Assuming a nice clean trend, which I'm sure it isn't)

[JohnWxy]

3. I think the 43% growth was World-wide.

http://www.gwec.net/index.php?id=30&no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=21&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=4&cHash=d0118b8972

We need to aggressively support expansion of Wind Turbine manufaacturers capacity to keep up or exceed this rate of growth into the future. In the U.S. this rate of growth would enable us to eliminate coal in about 11 yrs. (working from data found in the 2004 Alamanac).

According to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), this is largely due to the current threeyear window of stability in the federal incentive for wind energy, the production tax credit (PCT). “Thanks to the Congress’s extending the wind energy production credit before it expired for the first time in the credit’s history, the wind industry is looking forward to several recordbreaking years in a row,” said AWEA’s Executive Director Randall Swisher. Previous years had seen a constant up and down of the market, depending on whether the PTC had been renewed in time to create investor confidence.

The Canadian wind capacity increased by a staggering 53%. “Canada’s wind energy industry is growing by leaps and bounds – and that’s great news for Canadians who research shows are strongly in favour of wind energy,” said Robert Hornung, President of the Canadian Wind Energy Association (CanWEA). “2005 will be remembered as the year Canada first started to seriously exploit its massive wind energy potential.”

[Dogmudgeon]

4. 43% is much better

It also occurred to me that automobile factories could be easily adapted to produce windplants and a number of types of tidal-power devices.

Sustaining that growth is vital. All we'd have to do, though, is to discover one "super-field" of oil, even half the size of Ghawar field, and the announcement would be made that The Crisis Is Over. And a couple of years later, when The Crisis Is Back On, we'd be that much more thoroughly screwed.

--p!

[megatherium]

5. Yeah, they're telling us about tar sands, oil shale and coal. nt

[Dogmudgeon]

6. Tar Sands and Oil Shale were also discussed in the 1970s

The problem -- and a difficult one, at that -- is that it requires more energy to separate the hydrocarbon from its "matrix" of stone than is economical. Extraction from matrix also requires enormous amounts of water given current technologies. These sources of oil are simply impractical, though their promoters periodically renew interest in them by quoting lowball figures for sand/shale derived petroleum.

But there's plenty of the stuff, so there will never be a lack of petrochemicals for non-fuel and "boutique" fuel production. Extracting petroleum at relatively high cost for plastics manufacture, lubricants, and exotic jet fuels for the military will continue to be profitable, even with expensively extracted shale and sand oils.

Perhaps I will be proven wrong, and an inexpensive method for recovering the oil will be found. In that event, we will still be faced with the problem of carbon release when it's burned. That, too, involves a cost, and my concern is that it may be too expensive to allow ay future large-scale combustion-based energy sources.

The Age of Oil is coming to an end. Whether it comes in a traumatic crisis or in an orderly, planned phase-out is still for us to decide.

--p!

[eppur_se_muova]

7. As they say in the article, GB lags behind the rest of Europe in this.

With Blair as PM, one shouldn't expect much more than a metastasized ** administration.