Well it’s not much but it’s something. There were apparently obstacles to the UK building more wind farms in order to increase their chances to meet the EU targets of 15% energy supplied from renewable sources by 2020.

The first obstacle was that it was believed the grid could not cope with the irregular nature of the supply from the turbines thus having to invest in coal-powered plants as a backup. That’s now been disproved. Secondly, building wind farms offshore* was believed to be costly and inefficient. That has also been disproved, though there is no link to statements or studies so you’ll just have to take the BBC’s word for it.

There are still some obstacles however, the fact that wind turbines have to be imported brings their cost up due to a poor pound as an example.

Original Article

DECC Press Release

* offshore wind farms do produce more power as the winds are stonger offshore but as per an earlier statement, a lot of people prefer wind farms ‘out of sight’…

I should check Digg more often, there tends to be some interesting articles that don’t get picked up anywhere else.

Anyway, this is just a quick post to plug this very interesting article from Time Magazine on line about whether wind power can finally overcome fossil fuels as the main energy supplier, at least in the US.

I’m always wondering if I’m the only one who finds wind farms beautiful and awe inspiring, and would certainly not mind one off in the view of any of my windows…