In reply to Bob:
Well I did say I was a physicist, and we're not exactly known for being party animals. I went up Cul More last weekend, does that count?
There was a serious point behind my post though. For a very large fraction of the population, big numbers are just 'big', they make no attempt to understand or work with them. If this development really was one quadrillionth of the national consumption, it would absolutely not be worth installing it. Knowing it is a millionth lets us make some 'back of an envelope' guesses as to how worthwhile it is. For example:
There are 60 million people in the UK, so if we wanted to use such turbines for all our energy, the cost of the turbine will be spread over about 60 people (indirectly, via feed-in tariffs, increased business costs impacting wages etc). So ten grand or so each? Spread over it's life, say, 20 years. I wouldn't be happy with adding £500pa to my bill, so that's a rough guide saying it's probably not economically viable to do so. Especially as the cost of this one is probably much less than the cost of the rest of the possibilities, that's why they're doing this one first.
The land area of the UK is 250000 square km. If we want a million such turbines, we need to average 4 per square km. That may be possible (though unpopular) in mountain areas, but patently ridiculous in the vale of York. That tells us it would be impractical to get a large part of our energy from such turbines.
This type of calculation is very easy to do. The maths is easy, finding the numbers is easy. Anyone who passed Maths GCSE should be able to do the above in 5-10 minutes tops. It would be nice if more people would do it for themselves rather than listening to whatever the media and/or people with vested interests say.
P.S: this may be coming across as anti-hydro. Actually I'm not really anti-hydro, it's certainly better in most cases than wind, because it's predictable. It is an argument that renewables aren't going to give us everything we need, and thus we should look at installing a new generation of thermal (coal, oil, gas or nuclear, preferably nuclear) power plants.
Post edited at 14:04