Got a bit of news.  There are a lot of people who don’t like wind turbines.  They think they don’t look very good.  Generally I don’t like man-made things hanging around in natural surroundings either.

The difficulty for me is comparing the alternatives.  Would I prefer to see a 170 tonne lump of metal in a field for 25 years?

Or would I prefer that 750 times that weight of carbon dioxide* is added invisibly to the atmosphere, where it will remain for 500 years, due to coal being burnt in a power station?

Take your pick.

John Bell,

Ordinary Bloke

* Calculation is based on a Siemens SWT-2.3-101 turbine, which has a nominal power of 2.3 MW.  I used a wind speed calculation website to calculate the average ratio between annual kWh output and nominal power, of 3208.  From that I took 1% away to represent the average actual power output compared with sales figures.  Then multiplied that by the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per kWh of energy produced by burning coal.