Vattenfall Thanet Extension Offshore Wind Farm

Any of you following the pre application stage of the Manston DCO will be familiar with how national infrastructure projects appear on the Planning Inspectorate website, so here is the link https://infrastructure.planninginspectorate.gov.uk/projects/south-east/thanet-extension-offshore-wind-farm/?ipcsection=overview

Here is the link on the Vattenfall website https://corporate.vattenfall.co.uk/projects/wind-energy-projects/thanet-extension/ I went to their event at Turner Contemporary in Margate today.

My main thoughts on the matter relate to discoveries since the Thanet Windfarm was built, the only relevant one being particulate pollution from their vessels using Ramsgate Harbour blowing across the town reducing life expectancy in Ramsgate.

This is all in the same bag as the diesel car scrappage scheme and the problems associated with a freight hub at Manston, but whereas the RiverOak plans for Manston would most likely result in the premature deaths of thousands of local people the Vattenfall plans would only burn a tiny fraction of the fuel, so even without mitigation the affects would be negligible.  

To put this in perspective RSP want to have more that 10,000 freight ground movements at Manston per year and as one ground movement burns 1 tonne of jet fuel this means they want to burn 10,000 tonnes per year, mostly upwind of Ramsgate and Broadstairs.

I would doubt that all of the Vattenfall activity would burn more than 10 of tonnes of Diesel in Ramsgate per year and this burning would be subject to filtration, however Vattenfall are aware of the problem and were responsive.

They are working on hybrid craft, which would plug into turbines as well as the grid supply in the harbour.

All in all plenty of good business for Ramsgate with an informed and environmentally conscious company.

Here is the link to the last lot of books to go out in the bookshop http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/the-hogwarts-express-in-bookshop.html

And for those of you looking for something more esoteric here is the link to our Mind Body and Spirit books up to date for this week http://michaelsbookshop.com/mbs/

Only a very few Margate photos today this is the link 

 

Unhappy thoughts on Thanet’s offshore wind farm

I am just starting to put together my critique of the wind farm and in trying to point out how trivial this sort of panacea is to the very real problem of climate change and rising sea levels, I had to come up with a comparison that would be easy for the youf of today to understand.

Now if you fill up your car with 10 gallons of petrol in sixty seconds, the energy transfer rate from the petrol pump to the car is equivalent during the 60 seconds to the entire output of a 25 megawatt power generator for 60 seconds.

During the time that Thanet offshore wind farm runs efficiently and at maximum power, that is when the wind conditions are right I would guess about 25% of the time the whole wind farms energy transfer rate, from the turbines to the national grid is 300 megawatts, meaning that 24 – 7 it is able to produce about 75 megawatts or the same energy transfer rate as continuously filling three cars with petrol.

I took off my shop assistants hat for this one and put on my rather dusty engineering hat, I don’t think I have made a mistake here but would appreciate any corrections.