We had a fabulous trip in, in the immortal phrase of Donald Rumsfeld, “Old Europe.” The only problem, Rummy, with your formulation is that … well, it’s wrong. France, in the Southwest, where we were for part of the trip, is smart, prosperous, progressive and with friendly folks.
France, though, is far too reliant on nuclear power for my money. Well, it’s not my money, but you know what I mean, particularly if you’ve been reading this blog for awhile and know my views on nuclear power, and how utterly counterproductive it is to the necessary task at hand: reducing our greenhouse gases. For a three-part summary of why nukes are so regressive, see here, here and here. These posts, not incidentally, were before Fukushima.
While along the road the other day in France, what should loom on the horizon but one of the biggest nuclear complexes in the country, at Golfech. Here’s a picture from us from surprisingly close to the facility. Spooky.
By the way, about two-thirds of the energy going into the plant is going out in those streams of steam from the cooling towers. Waste is the reality of the central thermal power plant.
So, anyway, what’s that picture at the top? It’s the fairly fabulous Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, sitting in the shadow of the headquarters of Iberdrola, Spain’s top energy company and the world’s top wind power producer. Spain, as I recounted here last Winter, is a world leader, along with countries like Germany and Denmark, in renewable energy. Two summers ago I reported from Andalusia on some of the exciting solar power developments there.
While in Pamplona, you can see the wind power footprint in the hills surrounding the city. It’s inspiring. I met and talked with a software developer for Gamesa, a friend of one of our hosts there. Gamesa is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of wind turbines and maintains thousands of megawatts worldwide. Pamplona is also the home of CENER, the Spanish National Renewable Energy Center. They are doing seriously groundbreaking work there.
Check out the impressive concentration of wind farms in Northern Spain on this map from the European Wind Energy Association. It really made my heart feel good to see so many of these.
