Do Thanet District Council Dream of Electric Sheep? and other Sunday Rambles.

A Sunday morning meander round the local blogs, this is the time I really try to make sense of what they have been saying during the week, writing this into the ramble ensures this.

Prize to the most ludicrous post of the week has to go to the council, with one of their press releases that seems to be saying that the energy from sun falling on a sheep is enough to light 2,500 light bulbs.

I put the press release here at http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2011/02/solar-park.html Readit, now revealed as Ken Read of the new blog In2thanet that somehow shows as Inthanet at http://in2thanet.blogspot.com/ - man’s best intentions changed by machines or something, actually read the thing.

The claims of the renewable energy companies, that get large grants for building wind and solar energy farms, are so wildly optimistic that I tend to only glance at them now.

OK engineering hat, you can see from the picture at the top of the post, one of these solar panels is about the size of a sheep and the council says that 20,000 of these will generate an average of 4,000 to 5,000 megawatts, a megawatt is a million watts, I will use the 5,000 figure here as it is easier to calculate with.

So that is 5,000,000,000 watts divided by the number of panels 20,000 to give the average power from one panel, I think that is 250,000 watts.

So taking a light bulb as being 100 watts and dividing the power from one panel the size of a sheep 250,000 watts and dividing it by the power of the light bulb 100 watts you get the number of light bulbs it will power 2,500.

If you believe what the council have said you should also notice sheep exploding, due to the massive amount of power they absorb from the sun, conversely you may not believe everything the council says in its press releases.

Staying with he press release blog for a bit, one of the commentators there was under the impression, albeit after a few glasses of port, that it is me who actually writes the posts that appear there, see http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2011/02/thanet-college-squeezed.html#comments I can see I shall have to a bit careful over this one.

The latest post there is by Clive Hart, see http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2011/02/comment-turner-observer-article.html interesting to see that the architect of the Turner Contemporary recokns that the building is “almost shed-like” and looking at the bottom of the post it seems that Clive is once again leader of the local Labour group.

This gives a slightly Egyptian feel to the various struggles to become leader of the council, particularly as most of the councillors seemed to go along with the councils efforts to rig the leadership consultation.

I do wonder if the council had followed the wishes of the local people who managed to overcome the difficulties put up by the council, and unanimously responded that they wanted to elect a leader, if they would have chosen either Clive or Bob in the May elections.

I did ask the council if I could use one of their online petitions to get a leadership election, their answer was, yes but the council didn’t have to take any notice of it, however many people responded, so I haven’t bothered with it.

I figure that rigging an election will eventually rebound on them, but as the way a council leader is chosen seems to be intended by both the previous Labour and the present coalition governments, to be by the people, it does beg the following question.

What political parties, political ideologies do our councillors really represent, are a lot of them just using the parties names as flags of convenience to make sure they get local influence, allowances etc?

Thanet Life is the next blog down the sidebar to have anything that looks like local news, one again this can be a bit of a Acta Diurna, rather than a Notizie scritte although at least it won’t cost you a Gazetta. With our leader being the strong silent and apparently academic type, one is inclined to wonder if he occasionally uses Thanet Life rather in the way God uses Metreon.

Sorry about that I think I must have put the wrong hat on there for a moment, but one of the council officers did say to me that he thought Bob was the academic type, so I thought I would try something he would understand.

Assuming the title of Simon’s latest psto “In Caverna” is Latin then I translate this as “in the hollow.” See http://birchington.blogspot.com/2011/02/in-caverna.html

What concerns me about the recent information relating to council assets, is the defeatist way the council seems to view them as liabilities. The wailings of no money seem to conflict with the last eight years of Conservative local government at Thanet, the vast majority of which the Conservatives say the national Labour government was handing out funding like confetti.

Returning to the Egyptian theme, a dream of seven fat cows and one thin one comes to mind.

In a purely hypothetical way, the image the council wanting to offload a liability to a developer, that had the unfortunate problem of being also the asset “Margate Caves” it does seem that health and safety picture came along at convenient moment.

The problem with the caves and the other assets that were tourist attractions is that without them there are no tourists,to come to Margate to see an exhibition at the new shed-like Turner Contemporary that may take you an hour to view.

The museum could have taken another hour and the caves another and the problem is that the Turner is supposed to be an all year round attraction.

I think the council’s calculations over the money to sort the caves out, which maybe around the cost of a flat or maybe cost of a house, are a bit like the calculations over the energy produced by a sheep sized solar panel.

I think what is happening here is confusion between running costs and capital expenditure. Perhaps borrowing £100,000 at say 5% £5,000 a year £100 per week could produce a tourist attraction that generates £200 per week.

Simplistic I know, but the sort of thinking one could expect from entrepreneurial Conservative types.

Another interesting post from Simon last week was the on the police crime statistics website, Westgate had 79 crimes in December and Ramsgate about 470 putting the marker thingy down on the stations. So I reckon Simon gets a much quieter time than I do.

Now the initial rush, perhaps caused by Simon’s post has died down the website works ok see http://www.police.uk/

Posts all over the place on the biggest story this week, the closure of Pfizer, perhaps the thing we need to keep in the top of our minds is the enormous cost of clearing and decontaminating this site, something that Pfizer should have to cough up if an alternate use can’t be found.

I will ramble on as the day progresses.