Martin wrote:
I think you shouldn;t believe the crap the salesmen publish.

I don't listen to the 'salesmen' but get involved with research
companies and then apply our findings in our projects. We are indeed a
long way from using renewable energy in our schemes, but we're still
young. We employ passionate, hard working and reputable people. We're
part of a huge network, have partners all around the world. I'm sure we
can do without the 'salesmen' whatever you mean by this )

Wait until the summer when there isn't enough wind for weeks.

The UK is the windiest country in Europe, so we have a massive resource
waiting to be used. And in the future, all our electricity could come
from a mix of complementary renewable sources - balancing wind power
with wave, tidal, solar and biomass.

No power stations are able to operate all the time without stopping.
Many so-called reliable sources such as nuclear plants suffer from
unexpected 'outages' when reactors must be shut down, often at short
notice, for essential safety maintenance. Unreliability of this kind is
far harder to deal with than the intermittency of wind power, as the
amounts of electricity involved are generally much higher. By
comparison the variation in output from wind farms distributed around
the country is scarcely noticeable. A great advantage of wind power is
that the available wind resource is much greater during the colder
months of the year, when energy demand is at its highest. And the wind
will never stop blowing everywhere in the UK at once!

How much has been generated in the last 8 days?

Dunno. We could never rely on wind turbines alone to provide for all
our electricity needs. But there are storage technologies we can use,
such as pumped storage hydro power schemes (where water is pumped
up-hill, thus acting like large batteries for the electricity system).
Hydrogen offers a potential way of storing electricity from wind power.
Excess wind power can be used to produce hydrogen through electrolysis,
and then hydrogen can be turned back into electricity using a fuel
cell, as and when it is needed.

Did you have your car scrapped?

No. I run on biodiesel and looking to get a tuc tuc which will run on
CNG. What about you Martin? How do you do your bit?