The clean green future doesn’t have much room for wilderness
By Jo Nova
John Constable puts some numbers on The terrifying scale of the green revolution in The Spectator this week.
Ponder just the scale of the Sophia Offshore industrial wind plant being built off the UK. The wind is free, but to collect enough of it to power 2% of the country, the UK will have to build 100 wind turbines, some 200 kilometers out in the North Sea. Each blade is 108m long and weighs 65 tons, or about as much as a semi-trailer. When the wind blows hard enough, about 200 tons of matter will rotate above the ocean. The box holding all the spinning parts together weighs another 500 tons and needs to be suspended 140 meters up in the air over the waves and during storms.
Each of the 100 turbines will reach 250 meters high, which is “only 60m short of Britain’s tallest building”. So much effort and so little to show for it.
To make sure the whole thing doesn’t fall in the drink with the first stiff breeze, the turbines need to be weighed down with more than a thousand tons of concrete embedded in the sea floor.
The blades will be “recyclable” they say, but who will clean all that concrete out of the wilderness 30 years from now I wonder? Let’s ask Greenpeace!
All up, each windmill weighs around 3,000 tons, and the entire farm-that-grows-nothing will consume 300,000 tons of industrial material and cover 600 square kilometers.
All this to make just a random 2% of the UK’s electricity, not necessarily when it’s needed, either, so even if the UK built 50 plants just like it, they’d still need to build an entire functioning generation network as back up.
The Sophia plant will cost about £3 billion, and won’t last very long (compared to a normal power plant). But it will kill some whales and eagles, confuse Air Force and shipping radars and hypnotize some crabs. It may deafen a few porpoises too, not that they will complain. (Where are the Greens?)
Two whole converter stations will also be built — one at sea and one onshore — to collect and convert the green electrons so they can be squeezed through the 200 kilometer long subsea cable. These decks (in yellow below) were made in Indonesia, where they still have affordable electricity.
The Sleipnir semi-submersible crane vessel and installed jacket for the offshore converter platform ahead of the top side being installed. Sofia offshore wind farm, North Sea, August 12th 2024
If President Xi wanted to knock out the entire power station, by the way, he wouldn’t need to fire any missiles or send in a SWAT team. A Chinese cargo ship could just accidentally drag its anchor across the 200 kilometer cable somewhere. It’s been known to happen.
Vessel Aeolus arriving at Port of Tyne (May 2024)
As John Constable says, the 30 year old Sizewell B nuclear plant uses half a square kilometer and still makes 10TWh of reliable electricity. The Sophia wind plant uses 600 square kilometers to make 6 TWh of random power.
The wind plant effectively afflicts 3,000 times as much of the surface of Earth as a nuclear plant does for the amount of energy made, yet the Greens cheer it on. What have they become…
Read it all at The Spectator.
hat tip Tonyb
Photos from the Sophia gallery.