Within the next 2 years there will be an offshore turbine constructed just off the coast of Britain and it will be about 500ft tall with a diameter of 475ft.

The mammoth 10 megawatt machine, dubbed Britannia, may become a growing trend says the project leader Bill Grainger.

He doesn’t see a reason why offshore turbines should not get evener larger, as the larger they are, the more power it creates which makes economic sense.

Mr Grainger, who heads the Britannia design team, told The Engineer magazine: ”There isn’t a technical issue that screams out size limit.

”You have to make changes as you get bigger. Blades get floppier, for example, so you have to put more carbon in, but we aren’t anywhere near 100% carbon yet.”

The Britannia turbine is being built in Blyth, Northumberland, will have 3 enormous blades which will each weigh more than 30 tonnes. The circumference of the blades will be 100ft wider than the London eye. The most likely location for Britannia is Dogger Bank, just off the north-east coast.

The turbine will rise 574ft above the waves and will generate enough electricity to power 10,000 homes. Over its lifetime could replace 2 million barrels of oil.

Clipper Windpower Marine is splashing out with £44 million for the turbine’s building facilities, including a blade factory in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. There will also be £5 million contributed from the local regional development agency.

Mr. Grainger did say, ”There might be a limit to the size that people want to put into the field; if a 20 megawatt turbine failed, that’s a big chunk of electricity to lose. But then, if a power station goes off-line you’ve lost 300 megawatts, so I don’t think that’s a limit either”

”They’ll get bigger than 10 megawatts, is my feeling. How much bigger? I don’t know.”

The Welsh Assembly Government set out plans to create a zero-waste society.

Welsh environment minister Jane Davidson spoke about the countries new waste strategy “Towards Zero Waste”.

While the minister was eager to show she was ‘broadly supportive’ of methods that get results, she made it clear that Welsh would not go down the route of punishing or rewarding those involved in the programme.

She completely ruled out copying schemes like Recycle-Bank which looks likely to be used across London after being supported by Mayor Boris Johnson and his waste advisor Isobel Dedring

Ms Davidson said: “In England the focus is on how to make people recycle more – in Wales we recognise it’s more important to stop this waste in the first place.”

“We believe that our plans – including separate food waste collections and smaller bins – will do this.”

“Costly measures like those adopted in England, such as retaining a weekly bin collection or rewarding people for throwing more recyclable rubbish away, won’t.”

Welsh targets will aim for at least 70% of waste recycled by 2025 and cut carbon by 27%.

The Welsh minister said Wales has risen its recycling more than any other country in the UK, with an increase of 30% in the past decade beating England who has only managed a 25% increase.

Wales also were the first in the UK to introduce Landfill Allowance Scheme and have passed every target set out under it.

BuilderScrap supports the Welsh waste strategy!

A report from the Centre for Alternative Technology concludes that a massive expansion in offshore wind, a switch to electric vehicles and steps to halve household energy demand would make the country “zero-carbon” by the end of the next decade and without the need to rely on nuclear power.

The study said energy demand in buildings could be halved if changes such as; improved insulation, eliminating draughts and improving the efficiency of heating technology came in to effect.

It will need “whole house” refurbishment to upgrade energy efficiency and for new homes to be built from natural materials such as wood and straw to lock in carbon in an effort to cut overall emissions.

The report also said there should be a switch to electric vehicles, which would generate 50% less carbon dioxide than petrol or diesel cars.

As the grid is “decarbonised”, electrical vehicles will be even more environmentally friendly, however this will raise a huge demand for electricity, so, “smart charging” will be introduced in which they are charged up overnight when power demand is low – which will limit the extra pressure on the grid.

Domestic flights would be replaced with bus or rail travel, with fewer journeys taken overall.

After looking through some of the previous blogs I decided to write one that relates to how we can reduce the pollution in our cities and ultimately the global production of greenhouse gases. I came across several different methods in which a car can use hydrogen as a full or partial fuel and they all have there pro’s and cons.

The first is the more obvious and seemingly more popular one. The fuel cell has been around for a long time the principal was published in 1838 by Christian Friedrich Schönbein and was quickly taken up by Sir William Robert Grove, who in February 1839 invented the first fuel cell using very similar materials to the one’s we use today.

Cars today that use fuel cells have some catching up to do before they become a good replacement for the modern combustion engine. The efficiency of fuel cells has already been proven, between 2002 and 2007 several buses and taxi’s using fuel cells as a power source were driven around London. It is expected that by making the switch we could cut our greenhouse emissions by half.

Another option is using hydrogen as a direct fuel in other words replacing petrol and diesel with cars that burn hydrogen instead, you lose some of the efficiency from using a fuel cell but you get much more power (280hp) as apposed to the equivalent fuel cell (80hp). Right now it is unknown which one will win over but in the mean time it looks like the petrol and diesel engines will hang around till approximately 2030.

Another option which I recently found is instead of introducing fully hydrogen cars immediately, hydrogen can be generated on the go using only distilled water and electrolyte. While researching I came across a petrol/diesel and hydrogen hybrid system which can be attached to almost any car which still burns petrol/diesel but at a reduced rate. It does this by instead of burning air and fossil fuel it burns air, petrol/diesel, pure oxygen and hydrogen.

The system attaches directly to your air intake and tricks the car into thinking less air is going into the engine so the car then puts in less fuel. Hydrogen and oxygen produced from the hybrid system are fed into the engine through the air intake and the car benefits from burning a cleaner fuel along with a moderate power gain from burning a more volatile fuel and you the consumer don’t need to go to the petrol station as often. In some case studies, some cars are found to have gained an extra 20MPG just from using this system and some rumours say cars that are already efficient will gain a lot more.