Europe is full of stupid bloody windmills.
– text message from Michael Jennings on an Autobahn
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Samizdata quote of the dayNovember 18th, 2010 |
 8 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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It’s also full of many better and more free-flowing roads, than anything the British motorway network has to offer.
Before you say it, yes, we Brits paid for the construction of a bunch of them.
Ah! wind turbines! I thought it was some semi-secret sort of “tilting at windmills” thing… There seems to be a bit of that too in Europe.
You can’t have talked to every windmill- for all you know, you might find some smart bloody windmills if you just keep looking! And asking questions!
My initial thought was that this was related to Bergholt Stuttley “Bloody Stupid” Johnson(Link), landscape gardener & scale-impaired inventor on Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. Actually that might be fairly appropriate; covering vast acres with wind turbines at huge cost yet only generate power when the wind is “just right”, so you still have to buy the conventional power station as backup, is right up BS Johnson’s street.
Is “windmill” a new slang term for MEP?
Dave Walker
A lot of the advantages of European roads are in the number of people using them; the UK has about 6 meters of road per head of population, whicle France has about 14m. I believe the US has almost 18, and even the Dutch* have 8.
Obviously the number of cars per 1,000 people, and the degree to which they are used will have an impact, but this simple sum illustrates at least part of the problem.
*The Netherlands is the most crowded country in Europe if you consider the UK a single country, if you regard the individual parts of the UK as countries England is more crowded.
Well, Germany does have the most windmills. The reason the Germans aren’t all in the dark is they buy power from France which has a lot of nuclaer stations. It is all window dressing.
Before you say it, yes, we Brits paid for the construction of a bunch of them.
Well, on this trip we have been using French and German motorways, mostly, and its pretty much fair to say that the Germans paid for theirs. In the case of the French motorways, much of the cost is paid for by the people who use them, regardless of nationality. Driving across the top of France from Calais to Strasbourg cost us just over 40 euros in tolls in total, but the roads were superb all the way. The German autobahns between Karlsruhe and Munich were free to use, but were rather more variable in quality.