Wiltshire Times article on Weaver's Mill Turbine Application

The Wiltshire Times has published an article on the application for a Kaplan turbine at Weaver's Mill Avoncliff.

It looks like the Duke Street, Trowbridge sub editors were away early for the weekend as it's littered with mistakes.

Predictably the WT swerves any mention of the history of hydropower applications at Avoncliff - not much of a surprise there really... (hint : try searching the archives here on the blog or on the main North Mill website) 

The article's author  also doesn't bother to look closely enough at the application to see the raft of issues that make this application very problematic. So... actually reading it won't inform you any more than reading

  the planning docs at Wiltshire Council.  

ps if you're wondering why I've put the Wiltshire Time article link to The Wayback Machine - it's because the WT has some history of "disappearing" articles about hydropower in Bradford on Avon - two articles about the Kingston Mill scheme were removed from the "local newspaper of record" web site without explanation several years back.... and Duke Street have repeatedly spiked stories which portrayed the Environment Agency as failing in their duties or worse. 

Renewables ... Wind Power

As the few folk who've read the blog over a long period know I'm fond of pointing out that renewables are intermittent and unpredictable as in if you were say, solely connected to a wind turbine - you'd have around 44 hours of electricity a week (out of 168 hours) randomly - on average.

Well today...

 Wind power is down to 0.5% of it's capacity

Paul Homewood at the notalotofpeopleknowthat blog has a post up which details the woeful situation - I don't think I can improve on it.

How would you feel if the electric had been cut off at 10am yesterday?

I can only echo Paul's final sentence:

When will somebody tell the emperor that he is wearing no clothes?

The dishonesty of the renewables crowd is quite epic - we are regularly regaled with "the achievements of renewables" which I have to say usually do not stand up to close scrutiny  - but the reticence when it comes to the shortcomings ...  is also telling.      

Now... if  99.5% of electricity generation slowly  disappeared this morning... what would the reaction of the media be?  (OK....  trick question - you wouldn't know - because you'd have no media....eh?)