In reply to Jamie B:
> If local councils turn down every WF application it definitely WON'T be good news. Agreed, some locations are more appropriate than others, but a knee-jerk reaction to each and every proposal is surely not the way forward. I think some people (and unfortunately our "representative" body) are allowing themselves to be too precious in their visual sensibilities.....at the expense of a sustainable energy future.
I think the entire strategy, (assuming the govt have one), needs a thorough coat of looking at. As I understand it the big issue with increasing wind capacity is balancing the network, which means using constraint payments to pay windfarm operators more to not generate electricity than they are paid to produce it. This incentivices the windfarm operators, ( who tend to be speculators rather than power generation companies), to expand windfarms with the aim of increasing the income from constraint payments, not with the aim of providing sustainable generation. Locally to me there's a drive to build more and more wind turbines, but the obsolete ones don't get repaired or replaced, and I've never seen the existing windfarms running at full capacity.
IMHO funding should be allocated to cracking the problem of providing energy storage to harness the output of windfarms rather than just switch them off, (and let the operators hoover up the subsidies), when output is greater than demand. Until that gets sorted then simply covering every scrap of the countryside with windfarms isn't an option.