The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #96832   Message #1898077
Posted By: GUEST,Boab
02-Dec-06 - 02:47 AM
Thread Name: BS: Wind turbine efficiency
Subject: RE: BS: Wind turbine efficiency
Good luck to those who support the idea of windmill power generation;any pollution-free device for power generation is better than nothing. But --"efficiency"? I can't imagine anything less efficient than a machine which uses as its primary power source a moving gas. Which is exactly what a windmill is. You could take any industrialised country in the world, build so many windmills that it took on the look of a porcupine, and there still would be a shortfall in power generation. Does anybody seriously believe that "Big Oil" would have been so serenely quiet about the proliferation of wind generation if the contents of their deep pockets had been to any extent threatened by wind power? I will back windmills any day in preference to fossil fuel power stations, or the supposed pollution-free nuke stations [ask the hill farmers in Scotland and Wales if they are yet free of fallout from Chernobyl--], but the day governments turn at last to the oceans for power generation, that'll be the day that the oil barons will sit up and take note---for any engineer [not employed in the oil industry!] will vouch for the fact that a water-driven turbine will hammer a wind-driven device out of sight in the efficiency stakes. Someday a combination of renewable energy devices MUST come through. Otherwise the future is frighteningly bleak.