Transition Culture

I think that the one every half mile is newspaper nonsense. It has been put like that to show the public the quantity. I expect that they will be grouped and one boat loaded with explosives might be able to take out a few. Would be a lot of trouble for a little.

I see in yesterday’s guardian that a sellafield contractor has disappeared after a ‘small, rudimentary’ bomb was discovered at his home in Cumbria and had to be blown up.

If he was a wind turbine contractor, it would be more puzzling rather than worrying.

‘search for Sellafield man missing after bomb find’ – Guardian Dec 12 07

Curious indeed – but if you visit this Wikipedia page ( http://tinyurl.com/2x5jpq ) and search for ‘innovation’ you can read an interesting discussion about Mr Hill and the WIF. I don’t know what to make of it at the end but he’s obviously alive and well and a little something …

It never ceases to amaze me the lengths that sinister lobby/pr groups and imaginary policy thinktanks will go to decry renewables. To claim that offshore wind is vulnerable to terrorism is ridiculous to the point of being comical. I live within view of an inland Wind farm at the Lammermuir hills, and it would be rather easy for me to drive up to the isolated spot and spend hours attempting to dismantle them. However as stated in the article above that would most likely require plastic explosive, something they weren’t selling in Boots the last time I checked. The only recent terrorist attacks that have taken place in the uk involved cumbersome home made explosives, and these were more unsuccessful than successful.

Transplanting those activies to the cold and choppy north sea, I find it hard to imagine how a terrorist group could gather the boats, people, semtex and time to take out any significant amount of wind generation, especially considering the very distributed nature of wind power.

Conversely, the nuclear power station at Torness along the road from me, I know it has security, but I often see anglers wandering very close to the complex in daylight, I don’t imagine it would take more than a group of 20-30 armed men to breach the security in cover of night. It’s remoteness would guarantee a significant time delay before any security service backup arrived on scene.

But the biggest power generation comes from the coal and gas fired power stations, and with so much exposed workings (e.g. coal conveyer belts fed by coal freight lines) they are incredibly vulnerable to being disabled.

If we really did worry about offshore vulnerability, being that turbines generate electricity it wouldn’t be difficult to mount a monitoring system on groups of turbines that used either radio or powerline networking to a central observation unit. It would still be a sub-fraction of the cost of necessary security for nuclear power.

Great find, Rob. Sometimes I think Italy is a hopeless country. So much sun, and so many madmen sorting out all possible excuses and arguments against solar power. Sometimes however, I am comforted to see that other countries have similar problems. Britain has so much wind along the coast line and, apparently, madmen like this one who thinks that wind towers are a good targets for terrorists. I’ll make a post on my blog on that!

Oh my God! I have four solar panels and a micro hydro generator and live in a remote location. Now I can’t sleep for fear of terrorists targeting my system.

Yes, I can see the headlines after an attack “Suicide Bomber blows up Wind Turbine off the Isle of Mull”, and the article continues…. Mrs. S.(Terry Jones in head scarf, looking terrified)of Manchester said “I am terrified. We are no longer safe. Didn’t the government see it coming?”.

In my panic I forgot to point out the error in your thinking, Rob.
“They might attempt to haul a large amount of welding equipment out to sea, with a generator, in order to try and fell a turbine, a pretty momentous task, and one that would presumably be spotted remotely pretty quickly.”
You don’t realise how determined terrorist can be. Armed with hacksaws, swimming out in the dead of night camouflaged as floatsom or ducks a bunch of terrorists could bring the country to a standstill.

In Edinburgh I heard someone arguing against trams as follows: “Trams are so quiet, people are not used to it, a lot of people are going to die on the rails…” and also “Trams are going to take away all our public space that’s left…”.

Sancta Simplicitas!

And that person was sincere in a way. Sincerely blind.

After reading about Hutton’s proposal I just wondered what will happen to all these wind turbines as sea levels rise. Maybe all the terrorists have to do is wait.

Makes no sense, not enough bang for your buck, if you’ll forgive the term. The terrorist objective is to undermine the system through the threat of violence underlined by a pointed example. The major international impact of the twin towers attack was not the initial wanton destruction and loss of life (not wanting to seem cold) but the economic ripples that resulted with markets dropping, the cost everything increasing coupled with increased paranoia. Blowing up a couple of windmills would (at worst) be a minor inconvenience that won’t make anyone tremble in their beds at night.

Its the silliest thing I have read for a long time… If this guy represents ‘World Innovation’ then we ARE doomed.

[…] Aha! Offshore Wind’s Fatal Flaw. How wind turbines make us vulnerable to terrorist attack. Or not. […]

It is no wonder that you people do not understand, as you are the same people who were against the construction of the western water highway, a scheme that would have given Britain around 10% of environmentally-friendly, none contaminating energy through hydro power.
Indeed, the thinking at Friends-of-the-Earth is at odds with its own outwardly thoughts at times and where it would prefer nuclear to pollutant free energy sources. It is about time that you and you ilk got your act together and based your thinking on pure logic.

Dr David Hill
Chief Executive
World Innovation Foundation
Bern, Switzerland
30th December 2007

It is no wonder that you people do not understand, as you are the same people who were against the construction of the western water highway, a scheme that would have given Britain around 10% of environmentally-friendly, none contaminating energy through hydro power.
Indeed, the thinking at Friends-of-the-Earth is at odds with its own outwardly thoughts at times and where it would prefer nuclear to pollutant free energy sources. It is about time that you and your ilk got your act together and based your thinking on pure logic.

Dr David Hill
Chief Executive
World Innovation Foundation
Bern, Switzerland
30th December 2007

I think we definitely need to apply logic to this situation as Dr Hill so clearly states. Just think of the sites already used for power generation and how sensible they are. Renewables should be considered for similar locations which are centrally located and not subject to terrorist attack. Now, just to refresh our memories – Sellafield, Dounreay, Hinckley Point.

Stephen Gascoigne

http://www.drgascoigne.com

Following Dr Hill’s response at the New Year, I visited both Wikipedia (link in letter above), and Dr Hill’s own website. Taking the two together is quite informative. Rob Hokpins said “If Mr Hill has any specific information, I think we should be told” but David Hill does not appear to have given us any such information. He does, however, appear to command the allegiance of a staggering number of nobel prizewinners.

Re: Comment 13 – it appears Dr Hill is tarring all so-called “environmentalists” with the same brush. I haven’t seen any mention of a preference of nuclear fission above renewables schemes on this site.

This outrageous story struck my with an analogy:

The Internet, and its predecessor ARPANET, was conceived with robustness and survivability in mind, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks (more).

Current, centralized energy structures – with nuclear reactors, large coal-fired plants etc. – put all the eggs in a few baskets. What we need is to design future energy networks along the Internet principle – “every man his own windmill, but connected to the grid”.

It’s worth understanding that there are “ring-zero” parts of the internet (e.g. DNS servers) providing co-ordination and control, such that their failure would have a huge impact on the internet’s effectiveness. Also, the dropout of wiring isn’t quickly mitigated either; it takes time for the routing mechanisms to discover one another and adjust.

It’s also worth remembering 10-Base2, the “coaxial cable” ethernet. There’s a reason why no-one uses it anymore; it falls over at low levels of congestion, because there is little control and co-ordination. CSMA/CD was a free-for-all, in just the same manner as ALOHA radio. The current internet infrastructure using switches and routers is more akin to “star” networks than “peer-to-peer”.

Now there are levels of hierarchy on the electricity grid as well, and there are unidirectional elements such as protection relays that fundamentally introduce limits on how many large generators can appear on electricity grids whilst maintaining stability. As a result, community-level generation makes sense in terms of controllability.

Lack of co-ordination between switching centres on the US and EU supergrids has contributed to large-scale blackouts (e.g. 2003).

Millions of small-scale generators working independently would be a grid stability nightmare.

Thanks for the interesting and knowledable reply, Jason! I don´t have the solution at hand. Just think that you are too pessimistic in writing off solutions to the stability problem. Millions of Japanese are running windmills and solar panels on their roofs, leading excess energy back into the grid. This seems to go without major problems. In Denmark, where I live, we have a draft for a project in which excess energy is stored by producing hydrogen, later to be used by power plants or in transportation. This does not avoid the energy equivalent of DNS-servers. But it surely gives energy production back to the people. Sort of.

As an example, you could have PV installed on an entire housing estate. You could either grid-tie each one individually, or they could all supply a separate network that feeds a single-point-of-entry into the grid.

The latter system would require more wiring, however it’s far easier to control, and (AFAIK) is compatible with the existing protection mechanisms.

This is a crucial point, Jason. What you say is that when communities begin to implement renewable energy into their households, the feed into the grid should be on a community level rather than from the individual household. This means that our current option in Denmark to switch a household windmill directly into the grid, facilitated by a certified electrician, might not be a very good idea. Or rather, that it is only feasible when the number of households to do so is insignificant. Further, this implies that development of gridlocked household renewable energy in communities should be closely coordinated with the local energy network, which sort of hightens the political stakes of the implementation process …

Thanks for pointing out this ridiculous argument. A response in kind:

Maybe Mr Hutton is thinking that said ‘terrorists’ will huff and they’ll puff and they’ll blow the windmills down?