Give The Slug just about any other source of energy over the much-touted wind-power revolution, because in his opinion you can’t go past the beauty of a smoke-belching coal-fired powerhouse, or a gas turbine in full cry, or even the majestic sight of cooling towers alongside a red-hot nuclear power station.
For the past few years every time a story has bobbed up about the wind-power revolution The Slug has asked to be excused from the debate.
Despite their best intentions and earnest true belief it seemed that the crew waving the wind-power flag where just another bunch of dark-green crazies trying to force their view of the world on everybody else – as well as telling us how to live.
But over the past month, The Slug has been forced to take stock. It has not been a conversion of Biblical proportions, but it has been an eye-opening experience that might have been shared by other readers of EnergyReview.net.
The sequence of events unfolded like this. On May 25 a small item appeared quoting the energy analysts at Douglas-Westwood predicting that around $US13 billion would be spent on offshore wind turbines over the next five years. In total this would mean the installation of 2300 wind turbines.
So what, thought The Slug. The dollar figure looks big, but it’s just an estimate – a sort of believe-it-when-you-see-it attitude.
A few days later, the wind debate clicked up another notch. This time Meridian Energy was saying it would spend $NZ130 million on a 60 megawatt wind farm in the Southland region of New Zealand – and a good place too, thought The Slug, damned windy place and ideal for a few turbines.
It wasn’t until June 9 that the penny dropped through The Slug’s biased brain. This was the time Royal Dutch/Shell said it would join in the bidding to build a £1.5 million wind farm comprising 270 turbines near London.
Over time, this giant “farm” at the mouth of the Thames could be generating 1000MW of power – a seriously big business, and one which even The Slug couldn’t dismiss as green waffle.
But the re-education of this Doubting Thomas was far from over. After the Royal Dutch/Shell announcement came a series of fresh wind-power statements:
June 16 saw the Victorian Government approve a 128 turbine project, generating 192MW, and costing $326 million for Waubra north-west of Melbourne.
June 17 saw the Royal Dutch/Shell company, Nuon, sign off on a 108MW wind-power project off the coast of The Netherlands, followed by two other announcements on the same day – South Australia’s 91MW York Peninsula project started operating and 58.5MW Cefn Croes project in Wales also started production.
The Slug, perhaps being a bit slow off the mark, is finally starting to realise that wind power is becoming a seriously interesting energy source.
The projects announced, planned and commissioned over the past month represent a collective 1500MW of power, the size of big coal-powered powerhouse – and that’s before counting the offshore turbine forecast from Douglas-Westwood.
Admittedly, the wind projects are scattered across the world, are not all operating (yet) and represent a tiny proportion of global energy consumption. But they are real, the money is being spent, and the trend can be clearly seen.
A serving of humble pie for The Slug, please, and make it a large one!
