Talk:Whitelee Wind Farm

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Comments[edit]

It says that over half a million people live within a 30 mile radius of it, just after saying it's 15km from Glasgow, which is home to around 2 million people. Surely it should be a bit more accurate? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.103.32.16 (talk) 01:52, 30 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Actually it says "within a 30 km radius". 30 km is about 19 miles. The source for both those "facts" is here. The population of Glasgow was 580,690 in 2006. You may be referring to Greater Glasgow, with "a population of 1,199,629 at the 2001 census". However, 30 km from Whitelee would include most of Greater Glasgow, as well as much of northern Ayrshire, and large parts of South Lanarkshire. You are right, it could be a lot more accurate. Jonathan Oldenbuck (talk) 10:13, 30 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Non-existent category[edit]

I've removed the entry for "fuel" in the infobox template. Previously it read "Wind", which placed the article in a non-existent Category:Wind power stations in Scotland. No other Scottish windfarm articles use the power station template, so this was the only place the problem arose. --Deskford (talk) 22:08, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Adjusted location[edit]

I've adjusted the coordinates given for the location. As I understand it, WP:GEO recommends that for an establishment that covers such a large area we should give the position of the main gate. I have interpreted this to mean the entry to the public visitor centre, taking the location from the map on the wind farm's own website. I have also reduced the precision — previously the coordinates were given in degrees to 6 decimal places, which I estimate to be a precision of just a few centimetres. --Deskford (talk) 22:39, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Missing Information[edit]

Like far too many sites extolling some energy project or other, the nearest approximation to an actual mention of the energy, rather than the mere power capacity of the "Farm", is "this will add an additional 217 MW of capacity, enough to power the equivalent of over 124,000 homes". The word "equivalent" means "not really" because 200 MW at 3 a.m. is probably more than 154,000 households need, but during the hours before dinner it might well be insufficient, and equally likely to be not there. The equivalent of powering a thousand homes is an exceedingly vague concept. A wind farm capacity of 540 MW might be expected to deliver between 100 and 180 MW-days of energy in an average day. By now, there ought to be information in actual energy units available. If the production factor were 25%, we might expect an average of just over 54,000 kW from 217 MW of turbines. That is less than 500 watts per household.

The Siemens SWT 2.3 108 m. turbine delivers its full 2300 kW at a wind speed of over 11 m/s, which is of course 40 km/hr or 25 mph. At 5 m/s, it delivers a mere 200 kW. At 25 m/s it cuts out. These data come from the Siemens website. The machine delivers its full power from Beaufort force 6 up to force 8 by feathering its blades, but even at force 6 the wind is enough for Small Craft Warnings. DaveyHume (talk) 21:40, 10 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]