With regard to your personal fuel poverty: contact ALIENERGY who may be able to point you to various forms of support. Tim, I’m sure will be happy to sell you a wood burning stove. You can be greener and better off!

Dr Douglas McKenzie also commented

I’ve seen early ones being decommissioned near Ilkley: they took the blades of first, then took the tower down.

Given the pace of change I suspect that only the nacelles (and perhaps the blades)will be replaced as innovation in concrete/steel towers is likely to be limited over the next twenty years but expect a big improvement in the turbines and the blades.

TTT: ho hum. And you are not thinking to include the carbon cost of transporting fossil fuels then? My point being that fossil fuels have heavy transport costs in terms of CO2 emissions. So, even if we presume that wood transport cost equal that of fossil fuels (and that is unlikely), you still win out burning wood rather than fossil fuels.

I was actually discussing this earlier tonight: what is the optimal distance over which a wood supply business should operate?

No-one has mentioned that the sea haars will prevent anyone at the golf course seeing much anyway for much of the time!

Just while we are on turbines, here is a fuller piece on Scots opinion in the light of Mr Trumps celebrated visit to the parliament earlier this week:
http://labs.yougov.co.uk/news/2012/04/25/trump-wind-power-no-effect/

On wood: it may not work for you Malcolm depending on the nature of your house but it is worth having a chat with a professional to see if a wood fired system might offer you significant savings. With the RHI scheme (and the Green Deal) both coming along the economics of wood should look very different next year.

I’m a bit puzzled by your comment that the wood chip would not offer you significant savings over oil. It should be about half the cost per kWh: http://www.biomassenergycentre.org.uk/portal/page?_pageid=75,59188&_dad=portal
Though this will obviously depend in part on your local supply. Wood chip SHOULD be more price stable than oil and increases your resilience (as you can always source wood locally but oil may not be so easy to obtain in the future).

Lastly, it is a common misunderstanding about wood burning. Wood does of course release CO2 when it is burned but providing the wood is being obtained from a sustainable forest then the CO2 emissions are negated by the CO2 being sequestered into the growing wood. It is thus carbon neutral. Fossil fuels on the other hand release CO2 but there is no compensating mechanism balancing this out.

Downside overall is that the sustainable supply of wood is quite limited and should be kept for domestic and light commercial use rather than used to produce electricity.

Argyll, Lomond and the Isles Energy: not for profit company: http://www.alienergy.org.uk/

They give a lot of support and advice as to what benefits you may due to alleviate fuel poverty: fuel poverty is defined as spending more than 10% of your total income on fuel. there is quite a lot of cash support available, especially to pensioners, mainly aimed at insulation, improved central heating etc.

With the domestic RHI coming in next year, it may be worth having another look at wood burning systems and solar water heating may also be a good way of reducing summer oil use.

Note the past tense WS. The US abandonment of wind power had everything to do with Reagan’s decision to back big oil over renewables and very little to do with the technology. A direct consequence of the neo-con decision to deregulate electricity generation in the US was the effective collapse of the public electricity supply in California. Needless to say, the US is now backing wind in pretty much the same way as pretty much every other sensible nation on the planet – but of course they now use Danish and increasingly Chinese turbines as they abandoned their possible technological lead in this field when Reagan turned his face against renewables for political reasons.

Recent comments by Dr Douglas McKenzie

Rustle with RussellMore utter rubbish from Lynda Henderson. Have you actually spoken to Bob Allen? Whoever told you the story sold you a pup and in your arrogance you cannot admit to be wrong so you make up this story that he was persuaded not to resign.

Your position is completely untenable.

Russell back in the bathtub, now trying to sink Keith Brown’s boatI’m afraid you condemn yourself by your own words. I don’t think that anyone reading what you have written here and the language you have used would conclude anything other than that you have a deep dislike for Mr Russell and that dislike is leading you to basically lose all sense of either proportion or impartiality. It doesn’t matter how well (or otherwise) you know Mr Russell you are clearly exercised by your interpretation of his actions and it is leading you well beyond the pale in what I would consider fair comment.

This vendetta against Mr Russell and the SNP is destroying FA’s credibility and I have to confess that I’m seriously considering whether or not to continue reading FA (which will cheer Malcolm up if nothing else). I for one am becoming increasingly disenchanted by the constant negativity and sheer nastiness that has crept into this blog. I say that with a lot more sorrow than anger because I think that FA could have been great and indeed still could but there has to be a degree of balance, civility and indeed humour. All we are getting here is bile and it is causing me heartburn.

Yet again, this is another instance where a member of the Government can do no right: speak up and be condemned as “desperate” or stay silent and be accused of not serving your constituents’ interests.