In reply to Matt Bill Platypus:
> As someone who enjoys being outdoors and enjoys the beauty of the natural landscape I am opposed to new pylons, 50m high pumping stations, etc.
The Dinorwic plant across the valley surely demonstrates this can be done relatively sensitively.
> On the face of it it seems to me that the 49.9MW figure has been calculated so that it purposefully brings it just under the capacity required for the application to be automatically determined by the National Infrastructure Planning Commission, as has already been mentioned.
I'm quite sure it has. What's wrong with that?
> I do not agree that we NEED more energy. We only NEED more energy if we want to continue using more energy. Humans can live perfectly well without laptops, cameras, mobile phones, TVs, DVD players. It is our greed for all these things that pushes us (and then the electricity companies) to require more energy.
We do NEED more electrical power, not just for our gadgets (I presume it's other people that should give up their computers and phones, not you and I) but for cleaner transport and more efficient heating.
We also need to invest in replacing and modernising old generating facilities, something that has been rather neglected for decades.
Not that this is power generation, this is energy storage, in itself an essential part of making a more flexible, more diverse, more robust grid work efficiently.
> I am also getting extremely fed up with the thousands of wind turbines popping up all over the countryside. At first they seemed like a good idea and when there is just one or two they are (almost) OK. But there are now swathes of them across the country, in some of the most beautiful ladscapes. Once Britain was covered in forest. Soon it will be covered in a forest of wind turbines, which kind of defeats the point of them being 'green'!
What alternative do you propose?
jk