Posts tagged as:

wind

In the wake of Poseidon

by Gareth 24 January 2010

A little something for the weekend: a wonderful picture of windfarm wakes — clouds forming in the wakes behind the front row of the Horns Rev windfarm, 14km off the coast of Denmark. Picture comes from here. Discussion of the implications for windfarm design at David McKay’s Without Hot Air blog, h/t to Stoat and [...]

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A sustainable energy future for NZ (without all the hot air)

by Phil Scadden 30 November 2009

This is a guest post by Phil Scadden, a regular commenter at Hot Topic (bio at the end of the post). Phil’s interested in energy issues, and has spent a considerable amount of his personal time developing an overview of New Zealand’s energy issues, inspired by the approach used by Cambridge physicist David MacKay in [...]

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Wind more welcome some places than others

by Bryan Walker 10 November 2009

Good and not-so-good news on wind energy.  First, a report that Spanish windfarms set a new record for wind-generated electricity over the weekend when for a few hours they provided 53% of the country’s total electricity needs. The winds were high and in previous years turbines would have been turned off because they were providing [...]

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Wind, water and sun are all we need

by Bryan Walker 22 October 2009

Wind, solar and water sources are sufficient to provide the world’s energy by 2030. Scientific American has a front cover article coming up in November to demonstrate that. Written by Mark Jacobson (left) and Mark Delucchi, it’s heartening information according to a Stanford University report. Turning away from combustion to electricity from renewable sources results [...]

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Plan B (not from outer space)

by Bryan Walker 12 October 2009

I hadn’t expected to be doing a Hot Topic review of Lester Brown’s book Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, since he writes about a variety of sustainability issues. However the 90 pages or so he devotes to climate change were irresistible for their sensible optimism and I report them here.
The Plan B books have [...]

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US should aim for 80% by 2020

by Bryan Walker 22 September 2009

Renowned American environmentalist Lester Brown offers measured optimism in an article published in the Washington Post on Sunday. He claims a surprisingly dramatic 9 percent drop in US carbon emissions over the past two years and the promise of further huge reductions.  Part of this decline, he acknowledges, was caused by the recession and higher [...]

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Big wind could wean China off coal

by Bryan Walker 17 September 2009

At least some Americans and Chinese are getting together to work on climate change. A team of researchers from Harvard University and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have been conducting a serious investigation into China’s wind power potential. Their work was the cover story for the Sep 11 issue of Science (sub required) and is reported [...]

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Bird on the wires

by Gareth 22 May 2009

Another week, another step forward in the relentless march of progress. Hot Topic now has its very own Twitter account: hottopicnz. Why? Is it simply born of the insufferable self-importance of your blogger, or does it have a purpose? Probably both, but I’ll only deal with the latter. In the process of keeping up-to-date [...]

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A pillow of winds

by Gareth 14 May 2009

Not content with being one of NZ’s leading climate cranks, energy consultant Bryan Leyland also has views on wind power that are well out of the mainstream. Muriel Newman’s NZ Centre for Policy Research this week gives Bryan a chance to fulminate about the economics of wind energy:

I believe that, given the high cost and [...]

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Maybe, maybe not

by Bryan Walker 28 April 2009

Although I emphasised the uncertainties of wind farms in the Waikato in my post a few weeks ago, it was dispiriting to read in the Waikato Times tonight that the massive wind farm Hauauru ma raki, proposed for the coastline south of Port Waikato, might never be built. The six-week Board of Enquiry hearing began [...]

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