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Wind Turbines.

Absolutely ..... certainly in the UK
Many people seem to be victims of an aspirational world where it's "vital" you have a massive flat screen telly/ satellite package , latest mobile , designer brand clothes etc.... not to mention eating out or going to the pub /coffee shop .... they expect all of these as a right ....
It is undoubtedly wrong that a person working full time is often worse off than someone who has no intention of ever working and is a third generation benefits scrounger....
Not sure how any of this is linked to huge great windmills blighting the wild spaces of our country side though .... ;-)


Mum would not let me get a paper round and as for pocket money yeah as for pocket money when i got a summer job she was standing at the door step with hand held open and there disappeared all of me 18 quids but bless her heart she did give me 10 ciggies for the day she was a hard woman and i did learn how to cook a sunday roast dinner clean a house from top to bottom change the beds do the washing and ironing and if i gave her a bit of back chat well best not go there but ended up in tears and sent to bed with no chance of having tea and all before puberty So what have i learned never never back chat a single mother of four even up to the age of 40 mum could put some fear on me if you look around these days at the young mums how many of them have got tourettes syndrome kids are not poor the parents are stupid they got the big flat screen plasma tv latest hand held mobile device on an extortionate contract for the rest of their lives fashion tacky jogging tops and bottoms from the catalogue with shoes to match which goes in the bin after a few days as the mum up the road got a different colour and mum don't want to be looking different and left out of the circle then Oh bugger shit and sugar broke one of me nail extensions nave to get that sorted thats a nice colour have them and can you do my toes to match oh don't I look good cept hair don't match nails but now it does well kid you got a bag of budget crisps for tea tonight Kids ain't poor Parents are Stupid

You'll never fail like common people You'll never watch your life slide out of view And then dance, and drink, and screw Because there's nothing else to do
I think Jarvis Cocker summed it up perfectly. That's why deprived regions are hotbeds of teen pregnancy, drug use crime and anti social behavior.
A lot of things that would help someone who maybe could better themselves have disappeared, A lot of the guys are work with had pretty deprived backgrounds but managed to get apprenticeships. A lot of less practical ones could've got a free university education and a lot more of them could've got a half decent council home in a half decent neighborhood. Now the same people with a chance at a bit of self improvement have got little hope, stuck in a B&B on a housing list or paying private rent to live in the crime ridden neighborhoods signing on. The windmills could be a good thing, the areas of economic decline are the former industrial heartlands of Britain, when we made the move from being a manufacturing economy to a finance/service one these areas fell into decline as nothing was there to replace them. If were building windmills we ought to be doing it here and creating more opportunities than we have been doing, like it or not we are out of the EU and all the patriotism and jingoism doesn't mean shit if we are looking at our infrastructure as something we can award a contract to the French to complete or the Chinese to knock up.
 

He as a car and the kid has two parents so he's doing ok and leaving is an option , theres hope .
 
Thats why we look at kids to gauge the measure . Trouble is poor kids understand and accept there is no money so if they miss a meal its just :confusion-shrug: and carry on . They build physiological walls to maintain their pride , £5 for school trip phffft who wants to go to an old castle anyway . £10 for a cub scout uniform :icon-surprised: nah its not for me thanks . I convinced myself and everyone else that i didn't like chocolate and i didn't want the same Nike stuff everyone else wore . Once while coming of age i suppose i worked all summer so i could buy the same school uniform as everyone else and i'd handwash my small collar white shirt every night but it wasn't long before somebody noticed i only had one uniform which brought an end to my interest in fitting in .

If there was any help out there teachers should be looking for skinny kids with a huge appetite , but its best they don't because social services would rather punish the kid than help the parents because "we don't have the resources".

It should be noted that i chuckle to myself remembering it all and i don't actually know any poor kids now .
yeah, i get all that shane, im one of four. dad on a mechanics wage. both my parents had hard lives, as did a lot in those days, from the working class terraces of manchester. i could type lots more but i wont bore you.
i too was the kid with the cheap gola trainers and trousers that were too short because mum was trying to squeeze another term out of them. no school trips that cost money for us, but do you know what, i wouldnt change much of it. we were rich in so many other ways.

people like my parents used there back ground as a reason to value what little they had, work very hard and make many personal sacrifices to improve there lives as much as they could.

not use it as an excuse to behave badly in society, leech off the state, steal, damage property, drink,snort, jack and smoke themselves half to death. safe in the knowledge that there will be some department, blinkered by there ideology, telling them its not there fault.

its everybody elses.
 
I was in your area when i was about 19 Chapel , Ashton under Lyne , the craic was good i liked the pubs and the girls were friendly so i thought this'll do me for a working holiday . Every single person I asked about work replied "sign on the "nab" and looked at me like i was stupid because i didn't want to . So giving up on finding a job by asking around in a pub i went walking towards Droylsden and Dukinfield looking for industrial units or building sites whatever only to be told yeah theres work here for you but you have to sign on the nab first :wtf:

Mother was one of 15 to farmer parents , dad liked a drink and wasn't shy of using his belt in answer to back chat , 50 years on some are rich while other live hand to mouth and everything in between, but all worked . Goes without saying those with the least drink the most but i'm pretty sure they ain't skint because they drink but rather they drink because they are skint . When all your effort amounts to nothing what difference does it make is the underlying issue i would guess .

My absent fathers salt of the earth parents produced 4 brothers and in descending age
Chief of Police
Alcoholic after his 18 year old son died while they were stealing a boiler from an empty house
My father , drunk womanizing gambler who never stopped in one place long enough to set roots
Ex Army millionaire businessman

All worked though so what exactly happened there i will never know , is it luck , personality , what ?

I've a vague notion while contemplating all 19 that those who did best found the right life partner very early . Just an odd rambling thought perhaps the system fails so because it is devised around two incomes shared ?
 
I was in your area when i was about 19 Chapel , Ashton under Lyne , the craic was good i liked the pubs and the girls were friendly so i thought this'll do me for a working holiday . Every single person I asked about work replied "sign on the "nab" and looked at me like i was stupid because i didn't want to . So giving up on finding a job by asking around in a pub i went walking towards Droylsden and Dukinfield looking for industrial units or building sites whatever only to be told yeah theres work here for you but you have to sign on the nab first :wtf:

Mother was one of 15 to farmer parents , dad liked a drink and wasn't shy of using his belt in answer to back chat , 50 years on some are rich while other live hand to mouth and everything in between, but all worked . Goes without saying those with the least drink the most but i'm pretty sure they ain't skint because they drink but rather they drink because they are skint . When all your effort amounts to nothing what difference does it make is the underlying issue i would guess .

My absent fathers salt of the earth parents produced 4 brothers and in descending age
Chief of Police
Alcoholic after his 18 year old son died while they were stealing a boiler from an empty house
My father , drunk womanizing gambler who never stopped in one place long enough to set roots
Ex Army millionaire businessman

All worked though so what exactly happened there i will never know , is it luck , personality , what ?

I've a vague notion while contemplating all 19 that those who did best found the right life partner very early . Just an odd rambling thought perhaps the system fails so because it is devised around two incomes shared ?
I always read your posts with interest Shayne, make more sense than a lot of others.
 
I'm glad my pointless ramblings amuse you Chas , my world view is based on things i've witnessed so you could line up the Pope , Einstein , Bill Gates and whoever else you can think of to tell me windfarms aren't a profitable scam and i would laugh at them because it doesn't take a genius to work out if you have to plant 100 so 1 might turn then all the evidence regardless of what it cost to produce is a lie .
 
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Sit back and think. I've learned from my previous posts on here, that one persons view differs from others.

I think that there's no point in trying to push a view or to try to make another member change their point of view.

I've basically decided to avoid threads of contest and..... I recommend that ALL parties should value your membership in this fantastic forum aaaaaand....

Wind your mouth's in! And SHUT THE FXXK UP!

That's all! :thumbup:
 
I was in your area when i was about 19 Chapel , Ashton under Lyne , the craic was good i liked the pubs and the girls were friendly so i thought this'll do me for a working holiday . Every single person I asked about work replied "sign on the "nab" and looked at me like i was stupid because i didn't want to . So giving up on finding a job by asking around in a pub i went walking towards Droylsden and Dukinfield looking for industrial units or building sites whatever only to be told yeah theres work here for you but you have to sign on the nab first :wtf:

Mother was one of 15 to farmer parents , dad liked a drink and wasn't shy of using his belt in answer to back chat , 50 years on some are rich while other live hand to mouth and everything in between, but all worked . Goes without saying those with the least drink the most but i'm pretty sure they ain't skint because they drink but rather they drink because they are skint . When all your effort amounts to nothing what difference does it make is the underlying issue i would guess .

My absent fathers salt of the earth parents produced 4 brothers and in descending age
Chief of Police
Alcoholic after his 18 year old son died while they were stealing a boiler from an empty house
My father , drunk womanizing gambler who never stopped in one place long enough to set roots
Ex Army millionaire businessman

All worked though so what exactly happened there i will never know , is it luck , personality , what ?

I've a vague notion while contemplating all 19 that those who did best found the right life partner very early . Just an odd rambling thought perhaps the system fails so because it is devised around two incomes shared ?
my old man is actually from Droylsden, mother from newton heath. his father was a lurryman who was called up to serve in the war. starved of his army issue woodbines he was pretty handy with the belt and fists... my father left school at 14 and home at 16, makes me laugh how apparently the youth of today supposedly grow up quicker. always wanted to be in agriculture but the heavy engineering that was in the area payed twice as much. anyway, after various engineering/mechanicing jobs he was made redundant by BT when they were privatised. now in his late fifties within a week he got a job with a rag tag outfit erecting telegraph poles. having his class 1 he drove the lorry as well. this did him no favours, when one night driving back up from birmingham a belgium tanker entered the motorway and crossed right into his path, i remember him saying he was standing on the brakes and pulling up on the bottom of the steering wheel, but the POS was ill maintained and he ploughed into the side of it. after being cut out he was unable to work for three months. he had a job to go back to once he had healed, but it was physically demanding and his body wasnt up to it anymore. so he got a job at a airbag factory for four years to bring him up to 65.
now at 80, he will still do a week or so digger driving for beer money. does all the work on his 100 series and my sisters van. hes in pain a lot of the time with his shot hip, bad back, busted shoulder, hands he cant clench anymore. perforated ear drum, probable due to the drop hammers, and out of breath, probable due to the diesel fumes that used to fill the garages.
non the less he has this deep inner work ethic, to never give up. to be self sufficient and ask for nothing from the state.

he wont throw anything away. i asked him once why he keeps hold of all this "scrap"? his reply was that they had nothing when he was a lad, "and i mean nothing.." everything could be re used, no food was ever wasted. yet they never locked the front door. the front door step and windows were cleaned daily, that didnt cost anything, and they still had there self respect.

when i was close to leaving school with no idea what i wanted to do and no qualifications. he gave me his careers advice:

"son, theres always work out there, youve just got to look for it and have more than one string to your bow"

"if you ever end up on the dole, you will give every penny to your mother for your keep. until you get off your arse and find a job or you leave this place".

going back a few decades. he was always a country lad at heart, and managed to buy a small terraced house in a village near hazel grove. then a by pass was built through the village, and it was the beginning of middle class suburbians moving out of the leafy suburbs into villages. the old timers were replaced with "professional" people. these people tended to moan at him for working on his battered old series 11 late on a sunday evening to make work on the monday. the old timers used to lend a hand..

so he took a chance. he bought four walls on the side of a hill. it wasnt even for sale. he used to spot a ruin in the middle of a field, knock on the farmers door and ask if he would sell it. "if you dont ask. youll never know.." this farmer said yes. "i dont know why youd want to live there, but its yours if you want it."

so he shipped us all out.

we already had a old single glazed caravan that we used to go on our holidays to scotland with. he bought another and set them both up in the yard. me my brother and sister stayed in one, my parents and new born sister the other.
he couldnt get a mortgage on the place. we had no mains electricity, no sewers, no mains water. there was a old well.

we set up a old BT generator, strange, we had a lot of old BT stuff.. they used to skip a lot of old stuff apparently and he would rescue it from the skip. once the house was weathered we had a old pink tin bath set up in a freezing shell of a building. there was a old copper water cylinder on a table at the end of the bath, with a big ex BT gas burner under it. after about 1.5 hrs the water was hot enough for a bath. the shitter was the original out house on the end of a shed. a curtain, no door. yep, you guessed it, a wooden plank with a hole in it and a bucket underneath.
at the time my dad was still working in manchester so we used to get a bucket of cold water to wash in at 6 am before he left for work, and i got up for school. we would then walk through two fields to get a taxi which would take us to the bus station at the nearest town. we used to do this in all weathers and it can get pretty bleak up here.
mother didnt pass her driving test until she was about 65, so she quite often walked a four mile round trip to the bus stop, shopping bags and all.
we spent nearly three years in them caravans, the place isnt really completely finished to this day.

TBH im not sure where i was going with all that, but ive always been brought up to believe your destiny is in you own hands, in this country anyway, even if you feel as though your constantly kicking up bank. some people are dealt a terminal set of bad cards through ill health, or a life changing accident etc. i get that.

imo theres no point in looking at those who we feel have "more" than us. wishing they had less, like its all gonna be shared out between us.. spend that energy instead on your own life and dreams, no matter how big or small they are.

so, wind turbines..
 
Your dad was a star Chapel :clap: almost every line of his story reminds me of something or someone .
Must be 6 years ago an uncle asked me to lend him 300 quid to buy a trailer , 6 months later i visited his field to borrow "my" trailer only to be told its gone you own a mini digger instead now and every visit since told a similar story , i can't remember if it was a tractor or a motorhome on my last visit :lol:
I should have been suspicious when the same fella asked me to give him a lift to pick up another trailer saying my tow hitch is higher but i thought hey its not far and its only going to be vaguely in contempt of sanity and law . It was only a full size farm trailer to be pulled by a tractor ..................... with the power stations own diesel backup generator on it :scared-eek: My little 90 got it home though and i've regretted ever since i never thought to take a photo but there are small pockets of old school out there still .

For years i have been trying to give the kid i once was a quarter of a million quids worth of tools with the instruction "here you go make a good life for yourself" and they don't want it ???
 
I'm not sure naming individuals whom I grew up with is really the way forward.... I know where they live , I know their family history.... therefore I know it's not a claim ..

Not going to get into the "when we were young we lived in a hole in the road we were so poor " type stories but we didn't always have enough food and wore S/H or cast off clothes ... ( not great when you end up going to a local "posh" Grammar School ) but we did have a fantastic loving home and parents that gave us everything they could..... I would never swap my upbringing for any other ..... I have 2 friends who are very very wealthy .... 1 was a Barnardo's Boy and 1 left school at 15 and had a market stall ..... life is what you make it ....
 
In the interest of this thread returning to the original subject and questions regarding Wind Turbines and their viability I feel I should not take any further part in this thread......
 
In the interest of this thread returning to the original subject and questions regarding Wind Turbines and their viability I feel I should not take any further part in this thread......

I'm probably more guilty than most for wandering … So ill try to bring it back.
Why massive windmills ? Is there not some sense in the installation of smaller ones to feed a smaller number of consumers ? I see a couple of little ones that seem to be feeding an industrial unit on an estate. Why don't they go with this approach I wonder. Next time they throw up a housing estate part of the design is a couple of turbines that maybe run the streetlights on the estate, instead of those substations you have a little battery bank. Led lampposts round the estate and Bob's your fathers brother. They'd save a fortune on erecting the things at sea or on the moors etc. The less reliance you have on grid power is energy saved and emisisons reduced ….
 
There's a few around my area, one is big and in view from the west of my house.. I'm a mate of the guy, He said it'll pay itself in 12 years and I believe that it costed 160k. I don't mind it and just by looking at it I know which direction the wind is coming from.

There's a smaller one that's been around a bit longer but the wind was too strong and the fecker went on fire! Biggest problem was that the manufacturer of the turbine went bust so it's an expensive flag pole! Lol.

The next nearest is a pair of the smaller ones which seem reliable and have only seen them lowered once for maintenance.

Preference is the bigger turbines but I wouldn't want to see more than one of them.
 
There's a smaller one that's been around a bit longer but the wind was too strong and the fecker went on fire! Biggest problem was that the manufacturer of the turbine went bust so it's an expensive flag pole! Lol.
An off grid friend had one of the cheap smaller turbines, it lasted just over a year. One problem was that it was low voltage, the size of cable needed to help reduce transmission losses, together with batteries and control gear (which need replacing over time), made it a pricey installation. He still had to have a back up genny (one of the old Lister thumpers with load sensing ), not that cheap to run.
One benefit of the National Grid, is that it's there for all (if you can afford it), and balances out generation by whatever means. Transmission losses might be quite high sending leccy around the UK (something like 6 or 7 TWh lost last year), but if the wind is blowing, the rivers are running or the sun is shining in the North, the lights still turn on in the South and vice versa. In the sticks it can be expensive to get connected, but when a storm blows or lightning strikes, it's not me up the ladder trying to fix things without frying myself !
 
Right, as moderators we hardly ever get involved in curtailing conversation, removing off topic content or even banning folk. I and Chris really can't be arsed to keep folk in line, we have other work and other shit to deal with too. Inevitably it's never the threads about land cruisers and how to keep 80's as kings of the road that are contentious.

So keep this on topic, it's about those things that spin and make power and closely associated to that.

It's not about sniping each other or one upmanship.

If we can't be civil and keep within the great forum spirit that defines this place, I'll have no hesitation on closing this thread and inviting people to take a break.....
 
The turbines look much better today..
IMG_20210302_111344.jpg
 
An off grid friend had one of the cheap smaller turbines, it lasted just over a year. One problem was that it was low voltage, the size of cable needed to help reduce transmission losses, together with batteries and control gear (which need replacing over time), made it a pricey installation. He still had to have a back up genny (one of the old Lister thumpers with load sensing ), not that cheap to run.
One benefit of the National Grid, is that it's there for all (if you can afford it), and balances out generation by whatever means. Transmission losses might be quite high sending leccy around the UK (something like 6 or 7 TWh lost last year), but if the wind is blowing, the rivers are running or the sun is shining in the North, the lights still turn on in the South and vice versa. In the sticks it can be expensive to get connected, but when a storm blows or lightning strikes, it's not me up the ladder trying to fix things without frying myself !

I have been pondering the windmills again today and even though I'm broadly in favour of them, I wonder if anyone's done the sums ...
Right now the vast majority of us are burning fossil fuels, after reading today that in 8 years time Volvos wont have internal combustion engines, yep not hybrids but just electric, So knowing how lazy humans are everyone is going to eventually wanting more power from the grid than ever before. I don't know how much more current a car needs than a tray of Yorkshire puddings but its still an increase in demand. I wonder if they'll dot those things everywhere ?
 
You can get solar water heating panels that go on the roof, the water flows through glass tubes, seem to work well.
I think that there are quite a few problems coming up with vehicles going electric. With the government realising that they'll be out of pocket (£27 billion ish) through the loss of fuel duty, where will that be grabbed back from? Sourcing of rare earths etc. for batteries and electronics is already problematical. Energy security is another, there are huge solar plants being built in the Sahara (A Massive Solar Power Plant Is Taking Shape in the Sahara Desert - [Leaving Land Cruiser Club] as well as pv panel arrays) and elsewhere that could be, and probably are, supplying electricity to other countries, but whose finger is on the switch ? Talk of mini nuclear plants being developed by RR and others is interesting, but until fusion is cracked, there's still the waste to be dealt with and the more there are, the more chance of an accident. And again, fissile material supplies to be secured. There's beginning to be much interest in hydrogen, still needs some sort of power to produce it, but it's relatively clean and a possible / probable runner. A huge investment needed, but a change over of the present gas supply (high pressure mains is also run by the National Grid) could be done, but modifications to the means of using it would needed (something along the lines of when the changeover from town gas to natural gas took place), costly but possible (together with the occasional explosion !).......... and you could fill up your fuel cell vehicle from the cooker (hmmm).
 
And on that note, thread locked. I will come back to it and clean it up later
 
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