Relocation.

KM, all these problems are the same for ever other teams, i.e. Scunny, Rotherham, Donny, Walsall, Colchester etc. etc.

These problems haven't stopped them from building new stadia & moving on, why should they stop us?

I'm fed up with so called fans looking at issues & immediately throwing up their arms & saying it's impossible.

Nothing is impossible For heavens sake, if Scunny can do it, not once, but it looks like twice, surely with a little bit of thought into how they can, then we should be able to overcome these problems & move on.

Lots of teams that were considered to be smaller than us have done it, now we are the smaller, lesser team, & getting smaller!!

I believe that the knowledge and experience of Philip Day in the transfer of previous agricultural land & the subsequent compliance with planning laws will be  key.

To suggest that the clubs are going into this without producing a robust business plan is crazy and bizarre thinking. Do you really think that the club would be negotiating with prospective anchor tenants, even at a preliminary stage, without a thorough financial plan that had been discussed challenged and tested?

Obviously it may not happen, it may fall down on financials or planning constraints but I am absolutely certain that a new stadium, should it happen, will not be a 'white elephant' and 100% certain it will make a huge difference to the long term sustainability of GTFC

Some people have a natural suspicion of everyone but frankly i wouldn't want the club to be publishing the finite financial details and certainly not before planning, agreement with enabling developers etc were signed and sealed

Quoted from MarinerWY

Fair enough, interesting that you see it as 'greenwashing' as well. I need to do a bit more reading, it's a word that's increasingly cropping up, from various critics of the approaches towards climate change.

Oh, climate change certainly is happening and needs to be dealt with. The only carbon-free technology currently available which can produce enough energy for our uses is nuclear power but, unfortunately, the green movement likes to take the evidence-free view that this is too dangerous to use. On the other hand, they like to use all sorts of hand-waving estimation and claims to try and prove that wind and solar could potentially provide for our requirements. When doing so they always seem to ignore the expense and problems caused to the grid by all these intermittent sources of power feeding in and out. This is why a vote for renewables is actually a vote for gas-fired power stations which can spin up and down quickly when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing (or is blowing too hard).

As for the new stadium, I think any solar installation on the roofing would do little other than cost a good deal of money initially for little, if any return, and cause problems in the long run. Just look at the UK climate - not exactly known for being sunny, is it? How often do you really want to have people servicing and upkeeping panels on the top of a football stadium? Small wind turbines are just not worth the expense as they just don't produce much energy at all and the larger ones would be too noisy to install that close to town.

For me, the site near the crem seems like a good one, especially if the development does include facilities for the community in addition to the retail aspects of it. I was less than impressed with the originally planned site near Great Coates. Just too far out of town for me and I think somewhere much closer to the bulk of the population in the area, both Grimsby and Cleethorpes, is a better choice.

I have put my name on the petition in the club shop yesterday - there seems to be  agroundswell for it which is good, I just hope that the NIMBYS and the greenies dont fall out and we end up with nothing ! I think the clubs that have had new stadia have all benefitted from turn around in financial and playing form. An attractive place to come and play and watch would seem to be the best outcome - attract investment and perhaps a lift in the quality of players etc.
UTM!

Quoted from Maringer

Oh, climate change certainly is happening and needs to be dealt with. The only carbon-free technology currently available which can produce enough energy for our uses is nuclear power but, unfortunately, the green movement likes to take the evidence-free view that this is too dangerous to use. On the other hand, they like to use all sorts of hand-waving estimation and claims to try and prove that wind and solar could potentially provide for our requirements. When doing so they always seem to ignore the expense and problems caused to the grid by all these intermittent sources of power feeding in and out. This is why a vote for renewables is actually a vote for gas-fired power stations which can spin up and down quickly when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing (or is blowing too hard).

Without a doubt climate change is happening, I don´t think anyone can credibly deny that anymore. However I´ve heard the term ´green-washing' from many committed environmentalists, in fact it first cropped up in a preview of Naomi Klein's new book, This Changes Everything, in criticism of some of quick-fix solutions that appear grandoise but lack in substance. I don't know enough about nuclear power but I think the 'green movement' (the name doesn't help, it's not just environmentalists that should now have an interest in reducing emissions) is fairly split on it.

For me certainly aside from the energy source, one thing I would like to see is governments invest properly in alternative transport to get people out of cars. If trains were fast, reliable and importantly affordable, people would have an incentive to not own or not use their car so much. If we had decent transport systems in our cities: Leeds for example, the fourth biggest city and with West Yorkshire's urban area having nearly 2 million people, it's shocking that it doesn't have either a metro or a tram, just buses. It's quicker for me to get to Manchester (and even that should be sped up lots, and will be next year if I recall correctly) by train than from the North of Leeds out to East Leeds, for example. We can't fully undo what Beecham did as it would cost too much, but there's a lot of situations where we could really reduce car use in urban areas. A metro system costs a lot, but that comes down to where we place our priorities, and with all the evidence we have about the need to reduce emissions, in my opinion it should be a huge priority.

That and properly segregated bike lanes. In Seville when they installed a whole network of bike lanes fully segregated from both the road and footpath, cycling increased by ten times the previous amount. You see everyone, kids, the elderly, the cyclist-cyclists and every type of bike imaginable making their daily journeys: good for cleaner air, the environment and promoting healthy lifestyles.

Stuff is happening in the UK which will help... but it needs to happen much quicker if we are serious about reducing emissions.

For me I think the stark and unappealing truth is that people in the "global North" will have to make compromises to their quality of life to effectively bring down our level of consumption that leads to emissions, even if that means eating less meat (certainly doable, one day a week for example), or not taking domestic flights. The big changes and the alternatives need to come from governments, but I do think that folk can do their bit as well.

Sorry I've pulled this well off-topic. But interested as you're clearly very knowledgable about the practicality of solutions, and as I said, I need to read up on things a bit more!

Still OT (if you don't like it just ignore this post!)

Regarding the Greens vs Nuclear split, James Lovelock has now come out in favour of nuclear power and others such as George Monbiot are also very much pro. Unfortunately, whenever you get a 'movement' such as the Greens, it can quickly become an 'Us vs Them' situation so these two and others have been called 'traitor's for advocating nuclear power. When you actually look into the science, Nuclear power stations are actually extremely safe, even the older designs. For the record Fukushima wasn't a nuclear disaster - the reactors shut down correctly after the tsunami (which killed over 15,000 people) but the problems which occurred after that were due to the failure of the (badly designed) cooling systems which led to the release of some radioactive material. Not a single person was killed by radiation released and radiation levels in most of the exclusion zone around the plant (which is still enforced) are actually lower than natural background levels of radiation in some parts of the world. No real danger there, whatever the fearmongers would have you believe.

The modern and (hopefully) future designs of reactors are safer still. Here's some useful reading about the potential of Thorium Molten Salt reactors which were first designed in the 1960s and are better in every single way than Pressurised Water Reactors which are most commonly used today:

http://www.the-weinberg-foundation.org/

As for your comments about public transport, it's a nice idea, but our cities just don't lend themselves to decent transport links such as bike lanes. I've been to Seville myself once and the wide roads are ideal for bike lanes. You'll find the same in Belgium and Holland and other European countries. Here, we just don't really have the space for this sort of thing.

Ultimately, we're going to need to end up with electric cars which are much more efficient, not to mention non-polluting (depending on how the original electricity was generated). Better batteries are required but developments continue apace and I think the range available due to better battery technology in a decade will be surprisingly high. For range anxiety, range-extender engines (such as in the BMW i3) can provide extra distance. Whether these will run on Hydrogen (a bad idea, IMO) or more likely petrol/diesel engines, I don't know. Longer-term, it is quite possible to create synthetic liquid fuels using excess energy from Nuclear power plants which would be carbon-neutral.

The main thing for me would be to spend some money on developing MSRs and other Gen IV nuclear reactors. These could all but solve any waste problems (and it isn't much of a problem - much of the nuclear 'waste' we have stored could be burned in a reactor of the correct design) and provide safe, plentiful energy which could be used for desalination, irrigation and all sorts of stuff to improve farming yields as well as powering more intensive levels of recycling. No reason at all for any scarcity in the future as there is enough thorium and uranium around to power a high-tech civilisation for tens of thousands of years. Heck, you can even extract uranium and thorium from seawater pretty economically if required!

Anyway, off to lunch.

Apologies for the OT for those who weren't interested. Hope you didn't bother reading the post!  

Quoted from BIGChris

I believe that the knowledge and experience of Philip Day in the transfer of previous agricultural land & the subsequent compliance with planning laws will be  key.

To suggest that the clubs are going into this without producing a robust business plan is crazy and bizarre thinking. Do you really think that the club would be negotiating with prospective anchor tenants, even at a preliminary stage, without a thorough financial plan that had been discussed challenged and tested?

Obviously it may not happen, it may fall down on financials or planning constraints but I am absolutely certain that a new stadium, should it happen, will not be a 'white elephant' and 100% certain it will make a huge difference to the long term sustainability of GTFC

Some people have a natural suspicion of everyone but frankly i wouldn't want the club to be publishing the finite financial details and certainly not before planning, agreement with enabling developers etc were signed and sealed

Going on previous evidence of how the club has been run, I'd say it's not barmy. We've had no success either in football terms or financial ones for years. Failed miserably on both fronts, whoever you blame. Hardly a track record of success.

Who has challenged and tested the business plan?

No one is expecting confidential commercial details to be exposed, just what are the broad numbers concerned. You might be 100% certain it won't be a white elephant, but what reason has anyone else to believe that? I don't want to see my football club saddled with more debt and in hock to somebody else.

Before we all rush headlong into the unknown, we should have a clearer idea of what's involved. This isn't just another supermarket that we don't have any stake in and don't care about.

Quoted from mimma

KM, all these problems are the same for ever other teams, i.e. Scunny, Rotherham, Donny, Walsall, Colchester etc. etc.

These problems haven't stopped them from building new stadia & moving on, why should they stop us?

I'm fed up with so called fans looking at issues & immediately throwing up their arms & saying it's impossible.

Nothing is impossible For heavens sake, if Scunny can do it, not once, but it looks like twice, surely with a little bit of thought into how they can, then we should be able to overcome these problems & move on.

Lots of teams that were considered to be smaller than us have done it, now we are the smaller, lesser team, & getting smaller!!

Maybe those other clubs had better plans than us. Maybe they had a better strategy for dealing with potential objections.

I'm not saying things are impossible. Not by any means. Believe it or not I'm an optimistic person in life. I'm also a realist. Based on the track record of the club, I'd not place blind faith in what is being proposed.

All sorts of problems can be overcome, solutions can be found, great things achieved. But you can't do all that with pure willpower and a positive outlook alone. You've got to make things happen by dealing with them pragmatically.

It also helps if you engage properly with all stakeholders, not just say "we need this" and expect people to fall into line. Instead of blaming everyone else (the Council, the NIMBYs, the unconvinced fans) you've got to try to look at things from their point of view and try to counter those reasons.

If that makes me a "so called fan" then I'm happy to wear that cap. For your part, maybe you should go back and re-read what I wrote and spot the part where I metaphorically throw up my arms and say it's impossible. Until then can I call you a "so called reader"?

Quoted from Maringer

Still OT (if you don't like it just ignore this post!)

Regarding the Greens vs Nuclear split, James Lovelock has now come out in favour of nuclear power and others such as George Monbiot are also very much pro. Unfortunately, whenever you get a 'movement' such as the Greens, it can quickly become an 'Us vs Them' situation so these two and others have been called 'traitor's for advocating nuclear power. When you actually look into the science, Nuclear power stations are actually extremely safe, even the older designs. For the record Fukushima wasn't a nuclear disaster - the reactors shut down correctly after the tsunami (which killed over 15,000 people) but the problems which occurred after that were due to the failure of the (badly designed) cooling systems which led to the release of some radioactive material. Not a single person was killed by radiation released and radiation levels in most of the exclusion zone around the plant (which is still enforced) are actually lower than natural background levels of radiation in some parts of the world. No real danger there, whatever the fearmongers would have you believe.

The modern and (hopefully) future designs of reactors are safer still. Here's some useful reading about the potential of Thorium Molten Salt reactors which were first designed in the 1960s and are better in every single way than Pressurised Water Reactors which are most commonly used today:

http://www.the-weinberg-foundation.org/

As for your comments about public transport, it's a nice idea, but our cities just don't lend themselves to decent transport links such as bike lanes. I've been to Seville myself once and the wide roads are ideal for bike lanes. You'll find the same in Belgium and Holland and other European countries. Here, we just don't really have the space for this sort of thing.

Ultimately, we're going to need to end up with electric cars which are much more efficient, not to mention non-polluting (depending on how the original electricity was generated). Better batteries are required but developments continue apace and I think the range available due to better battery technology in a decade will be surprisingly high. For range anxiety, range-extender engines (such as in the BMW i3) can provide extra distance. Whether these will run on Hydrogen (a bad idea, IMO) or more likely petrol/diesel engines, I don't know. Longer-term, it is quite possible to create synthetic liquid fuels using excess energy from Nuclear power plants which would be carbon-neutral.

The main thing for me would be to spend some money on developing MSRs and other Gen IV nuclear reactors. These could all but solve any waste problems (and it isn't much of a problem - much of the nuclear 'waste' we have stored could be burned in a reactor of the correct design) and provide safe, plentiful energy which could be used for desalination, irrigation and all sorts of stuff to improve farming yields as well as powering more intensive levels of recycling. No reason at all for any scarcity in the future as there is enough thorium and uranium around to power a high-tech civilisation for tens of thousands of years. Heck, you can even extract uranium and thorium from seawater pretty economically if required!

Anyway, off to lunch.

Apologies for the OT for those who weren't interested. Hope you didn't bother reading the post!  

Who's got the paddle of rebuke???

Quoted from Maringer

You'll never get permission to have wind turbines that close to a residential area, IMO. Too noisy. Wind power is very unreliable so fundamentally relies on gas generation back-up at present in any case so won't be particularly 'green' regardless. Until a cost-effective energy storage technology is developed (other than hydro), renewables are only ever going to provide a fraction of our power. Now, if we tried to build the stadium in conjuction with a nuclear power station, I'd be all for that.  

Not close enough to population centres for that to happen, however.

Solar panels are mostly a waste of time in temperate regions. Very, very poor capacity factor. When the governments drop their subsidies further (as they undoubtedly will in due course), you're looking at an expensive installation which will cost a lot on upkeep with little, if any return.

Greenwashing this proposed development won't do anything but add cost and we really need to keep that to a minimum. By all means try and get sponsorship from Siemens or one of the other big wind turbine companies, but don't muck about trying to 'greenify' the development as that will do nothing but add cost.

I'm no expert but surely the solar panels used in this country are not dependant on the temperature, as in temperate zones, but available sunlight. Even if the sun doesn't break through the clouds solar panels do produce some electricity.