Letters / Time warp
Well … a return to regularly reading the pages of the Shetland News (after a productive but close to four-year detour into obtaining the QBE in household alternative-energy systems design and construction) makes me wonder if I haven’t been caught up in some sort of time warp.
Why is that? Because during that time, nothing seems to have moved forward at all regarding what was known five years ago as the Lang Kames project – nothing, that is, other than the advancement of a few budding political careers, and the receipt of considerable money payments to Viking Energy as a whole, as that organisation pursues its declared objectives apparently at public expense. And a lot of half-baked comment on it in the newspapers, of course – so here, for your entertainment, is mine.
I also see the same old tired arguments regarding the impact of the proposed wind farm on the views, the drainage of the terrain, possible terrain slippage, the effects on bird populations, the effects on tourism, and the possible adverse effects on the health of people whose properties stand in the way of this behemoth.
All of the above are perfectly reasonable and serious considerations, of course – I’m certainly not decrying them – but to my mind, they all serve to function as confusers and generators of a smokescreen, distracting attention away from what I see as being the main objection to such a project.
And that objection is: just how effective will it be in real terms of the reliable generation of electrical energy?
To find an answer to that question, I decided to take a look at a wide variety of wind turbine generators and their online published technical information, to see whether I could come up with a quick and accurate way to assess their true effectiveness.
A little thought led me to the blindingly obvious realisation that the controlling factor in all cases had to be the local average wind speed; not the ‘rated capacity’ of any given turbine, not the maximum local wind speed, not terrain considerations which could cram a large airflow into a funnel and increase its effect; but the calculated value that all wind speed conditions would average out to in clear-terrain conditions over the span of any given year.
A little more research led me to discover that, here in the northern hemisphere at least, the average annual wind speed is actually considered to be around 13 mph, which in metric terms is six metres/second, and in Beaufort Scale terms Force 3-4. Applying this 6m/sec test condition to various wind turbine power curves revealed to me than NO turbine of greater than 1 kW rated capacity is actually capable of generating more than 8 to 16 per cent of its stated maximum output. (The variation in turbine output from 8 to 16 per cent is produced by increasing the height of the support pylon, thus increasing the hub height of the turbine – which lifts it up out of ‘ground drag‘ airflow conditions, as far as possible.)
This finding came as something of a surprise. I realised right away that I’d have to find some practical means of testing whether it was truth or red herring. I got my confirmation on low-output turbines by considering the publicly-displayed output of the 6 kW wind turbine at the Unst Heritage Centre, which (on any day that the UHC is open and the wind is blowing sufficiently) can plainly be seen to generate a mere 720 watts of energy during a Force 6 (i.e. 25 mph) wind; then by considering the actual output of the 2.5 kW turbine that I repaired and maintained on request for a private owner out on the Westside just three years ago (which generates barely 120 watts in a Force 5).
I’ve taken it as further confirmation that the P.U.R.E. project on Unst doesn’t seem to have quite set the commercial world on fire, in the way that some of its adherents and apologists said they thought it would.
Taking this evaluation one step further: if a single wind turbine can only produce between 8 and 16 per cent of its rated output, then it follows that the power output evaluation for an entire wind farm must also be in the range of 8 – 16 per cent. This degree of under-performance cannot possibly be an economic proposition, either for a developer or an investor.
The situation as I see it now amounts to this: the current evaluation of wind turbine performance isn’t based on engineering considerations at all, but on wishful thinking. Of all the turbine constructors I surveyed, only one of them (Enercon, in Germany) has acknowledged the need to find a low-wind generating solution. The free availability of the information that allowed me to arrive at the conclusion above suggests that wind turbine technology is in the interesting position of being totally truthful and completely dishonest at the same time. – a perfect example of ‘caveat emptor’.
It appears that wind turbines (and in fact, entire wind farms) are heavily if not entirely dependent for their profitability on some sort of sleight-of-hand financial arrangement involving grants, subsidies, inflated feed-in tariffs (which cost all of us an insolent 11 per cent increase on our electricity bill, no matter how careful we are to conserve power in our own homes), CTCs, ROCs and whatever other exotic financial instruments can be dreamed up by the money-boys.
In addition to that, and considering that they are in fact toxic assets in their own right, I feel that they are very unlikely indeed to have been paid for out of savings. In other words, they’ve been probably built out of speculation on incurred debt, which will have to be serviced and eventually repaid whether the wind turbines justify themselves financially or not.
We have yet to see the full extent of the off balance-sheet debt and PFI machinations that were indulged in by the previous government, which made most (but not all) of us think that we were living in a glorious era of financial boom. I suspect that we’ll see the effects before very much longer, as world financial conditions gradually force an increase in interest rates on us all.
My perception is that, if the engineering of wind farms generally (and the proposed Lang Kames Project in particular) is as wrong as I think it is, and if Viking Energy succeed in their objectives (which, incidentally, were voted down by a 75-25 per cent show of hands at every single public meeting held on the subject a few years back) and thereby lumbers Shetland with around £400m of debt in order to build the Lang Kames wind farm, Shetland won’t have a future left at all – probably not even in the ‘affluent’ bit around Lerwick.
It’ll be far too late to backtrack once this project gets under way. It’ll be deemed ‘too big to fail’, and it’ll be cold comfort to its critics – who didn’t shout loudly enough about it when they could – to stand on a nice new viewing platform on the Ward of Bressay and observe 103 brand-new turbines all standing stock-still in one of Shetland’s many lulls or peaks in the weather – just as the Burradale turbines and all of the turbines outside various public halls do at the moment.
Viking Energy could always attempt to rebut this view, of course, by publishing their raw anemometer data from the test tower on Lang Kames – and try to show us all that our fears are unfounded; that the average wind speed high above the ridge to the west of the A970 is sufficient to justify siting ANY kind of wind turbine at that location – but the meters in the public halls are all available for viewing; so that no-one will have to accept anyone’s word for it as to how effective they are … because people can ask to check for themselves.
What Shetland has to decide now is whether it’s prepared to take a financial and engineering risk, which, if it fails, will probably cost all of its present and future younger generations their implied right and means to live and work here after they graduate from school.
‘Good’ engineering isn’t about taking risks; and it’s most certainly not about gambling. It’s about calculating accurately and dispassionately the consequences of proposed courses of action, and then organizing matters in such a way that all possible negative outcomes are eliminated in advance, and for well-understood reasons. Any other approach tends to lead to disaster – and in a situation where the actual inflation rate in this country is now 2.5 per cent a MONTH, not per annum, which works out to an annual inflation rate of 34 per cent; and with a long-overdue rise in interest rates very much in the offing; a disaster of the potential magnitude of a failed Viking Energy Project is something that not even mainland England could afford to risk.
That, in my opinion, is what makes the proposed Lang Kames Project such a socially and technically reckless proposition – and not one that anyone but a hard-core gambler would risk sinking their own money into.
If it’s built with massive debt anyway and subsequently crashes, leading to a quiet but general exodus of the fabled ‘high-tech, high-earning incomers’ who are expected to support the 20 per cent of the Shetland economy that isn’t utterly reliant on an income from the council or the government, the difficulties now facing this place as a result of past financial stupidities and malfeasance will be as nothing compared to the bleakness of the future it faces.
Philip Andrews
Belmont
Unst
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