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Originally Posted by Chancellor Valium
I do hate wind farms. They produce bugger all energy and look ugly. And the amount they produce differs from day to day.I don't see it as viable.
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One of the biggest problems with wind
farms is that the best places to put them are in the Highlands, and a lot of that is covered by peat bog. That peat represents the biggest carbon store in the UK (certainly more than all our woodlands and forests), and if in the process of constructing turbines you have to displace serveral thousand tonnes of peat you've at a stroke negated the point of building them in the first place. There's also some controversy on how much impact they have on bird species, so that's another factor you've got to consider when siting them. That's not to say that wind power is totally without merit, of course - they're by far and away the most developed form of renewable energy we have available to us
right now, (solar panels are terribly innefficient, and we just don't have the climate for them anyway). And of course, small scale wind turbines that you can stick on your roof have a lot of potential. You won't be self-sufficient, but your electricty bills will drop for certain (provided you live somewhere suitable, naturally).
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re: biomass - what about large hydroponic space stations? Then we could just have haulage between Earth and the stations...assuming we could find a green method of space travel...
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We'd need a space elevator, pretty much, or else the sort of anti-gravity drive that Harry Harrison conjured up in his book
The Daleth Effect.