Lunacy on sea: As Ministers agree to the world's biggest wind farm off Brighton, has Britain ever succumbed to a more catastrophic folly?
What
should be our reaction to daft stories like the one recently reported in
the Daily Mail about the 60ft wind turbine put up by the Welsh
government outside its offices in Aberystwyth to proclaim to the world
just how ‘green’ it is?
Erected
at a cost of £50,000 to the taxpayer, it turned out that this turbine
was so absurdly inefficient it was providing only £5 worth of
electricity a month. It would take more than 750 years to make the money
back.
In
recent years, we have seen plenty of little tales like this, showing
how often those who build these mini-turbines just to promote the
wonders of wind power seem to get horribly caught out.
There
was, for instance, the windmill put up next to a school in Portland,
Dorset, which had to be switched off because it was killing so many
seagulls that the headmaster had to come in early every morning to
remove their corpses, so the children wouldn’t be upset.
Scroll down for video
Madness: Pictured is the Inner Dowsing
offshore wind farm in the North Sea. Off shore wind power is subsidised
enormously by the British taxpayer
There
were the turbines built next to the playgrounds of 16 schools in the
north of Scotland, which had be shut down for ‘health and safety’
reasons after the blades of one flew off in a mere 40 mph wind - when,
fortunately, no children were in range.
Then,
of course, there was that babyish little windmill David Cameron wanted
to put on the roof of his £2.7million Notting Hill home in West London.
It would have provided enough current to power four low-energy light
bulbs - but, fortunately, it provoked such protests from his neighbours
that it was never heard of again.
On
one level, we may find stories like this darkly comical. But it is time
we stood back to take a more grown-up look at the very much larger and
more serious picture of just where we are being taken by this
infatuation with wind turbines, which lie at the very centre of our
national energy policy.
Today, we already have more than 5,000 giant turbines, with 25,000 smaller versions.
They are
proliferating so fast that from Cornwall to Caithness, East Anglia to
Cumbria, hundreds of local protest groups have sprung up to say ‘enough
is enough’.
But
the crucial objection to this obsession with wind farms is not just
that they disfigure our beautiful countryside or kill shocking numbers
of bird and bats.
In
purely practical terms, the real issue must surely be that they are so
astonishingly useless at achieving what they are supposed to do. Put all
those 5,000 giant turbines together and their combined output still
averages less than that of our single largest coal-fired power station.
The
obvious reason for this - though our politicians will never admit it -
is that the wind is the most inefficient means of producing electricity
ever devised, because it blows so variably and unpredictably.
Spreading: Wind farms now coat Britain from Cornwall to Scotland thanks to huge government subsidies
In fact, the whole case for wind farms is based on a central, endlessly repeated lie.
This
is the way in which its propagandists invariably talk about them only
in terms of their ‘capacity’, by which they mean the amount of
electricity they could produce if the wind was blowing at optimal speed
24 hours a day.
We
are told about ‘capacity’ all the time - by the wind industry,
politicians such as Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey, the
BBC and even the pages of Wikipedia.
But
the truth is that, thanks to the wind’s unreliability, they will
produce on average only between a quarter and a third of their
‘capacity’.
Often,
indeed, when we need electricity the most, on freezing, windless days
in mid-winter, they produce virtually no electricity at all.
Furthermore,
far from providing us, as we’re told, with unlimited clean, green,
free, planet-saving energy, wind farms are not just inefficient. They
are also so ludicrously impractical that if we weren’t all forced to
subsidise them to the tune of billions of pounds through our electricity
bills, no one would ever dream of building them.
A
cursory glance at the economics of the ‘smaller’ 100 ft-plus windmills
and the giant turbines in massive wind farms illustrates my point.
When
I looked at one of these smaller ones the other day, near where I live
in Somerset, I was astonished to discover that, though it is 120 ft and
would have cost at least £250,000 to install, it only has the ‘capacity’
to generate a maximum of 50 kilowatts at any given moment.
But
allowing for the vagaries of the wind, its actual output will average a
mere 13 kilowatts - barely enough to boil four kettles - at any one
time.
Yet,
for this, the owners can expect to receive £24,000 a year, of which a
staggering £17,500 will be subsidy, paid for by all of us through our
electricity bills.
The
sums for giant turbines are just as shocking. Earlier this month, Mr
Davey gave the go-ahead to his latest monster project, to build the
largest wind farm in the world just off the Sussex coast, right opposite
Brighton.
Visible: The manufacturers of the
planned farm off of the Brighton coast have boasted that the
60-square-mile construction will be seen from far and wide
Davey
gave the German energy firm E.on the green light to spend £2 billion on
building 100 or more colossal turbines up to 700 ft tall, nearly 200 ft
higher than the Blackpool Tower.
The
‘Rampion’ wind farm (so named, in yet another propaganda exercise, by
the children of a Sussex primary school) will cover more than 60 square
miles of the English Channel.
As even its developers say on their website, it will be visible all the way from Beachy Head to the Isle of Wight.
This
mighty forest of turbines, we are told, will supply to the national
grid ‘700 megawatts’ of power, enough to heat and light ‘450,000 homes’.
Yet,
in truth, thanks to the vagaries of the wind, their actual output - as
E.on’s own website admits in very small print - will be lucky to reach
240 megawatts, a third of that figure.
Even
for this, E.on can hope to earn £325 million a year. Yet, shockingly,
more than two-thirds of that sum, £220 million a year, will be paid by
all of us in subsidies.
To
see just how crazy this is in money terms, we can compare E.on’s wind
farm with our latest large gas-fired power station, opened two years ago
by another German firm, RWE, at Pembroke in south Wales.
Cahoots:
Successive Lid Dem Energy Secretaries Chris Huhne, left, and Ed Davey,
right, have committed Britain to impossible levels of wind turbine
production
Its
capital cost was £1billion, half that of the wind farm. But, in return
for that, the gas-fired plant can be relied on to generate nearly ten
times as much electricity, 2000 megawatts, 24 hours of every day.
For
that constantly available supply of power, even taking into account the
price of gas compared with wind power which is free, the cost is £50
per megawatt hour. While for the wildly unreliable supply we shall get
from Mr Davey’s monster wind farm, it is £155 per megawatt hour, more
than three times as much.
This
is the kind of mad mathematics I come across all the time when taking a
hard look at the price we are increasingly having to pay for what I
have called the great wind scam.
It’s
this weird delusion that we can base more and more of our national
electricity supply on subsidising ever more grotesquely expensive wind
farms.
It
is a course we first seriously embarked on in 2003 under Tony Blair. In
2008, Gordon Brown boasted that he wanted us to spend £100billion on
wind farms.
It
was a claim echoed by Chris Huhne, Davey’s Coalition predecessor as
Energy secretary, who talked of how we would need to build as many as
30,000 turbines to achieve a government target, six times as many as we
have now.
The
reason why all our politicians feel they must aim for such recklessly
ambitious targets is that, in 2007, Tony Blair agreed with his EU
colleagues that Britain would, by 2020, be producing 15 per cent of our
energy from ‘renewables’, such as wind power.
But Blair was so technically illiterate in making this pledge that he did not realise what he was letting us in for.
Illiterate: Blair signed the UK up to producing almost a third of its electricity from renewable sources
Because
much of our energy, such as the gas we use to cook and heat our
buildings, cannot be sourced from renewables, he was committing us to
produce nearly a third of our electricity - 32 per cent - from
renewables. And most of it had to come from wind power.
This
was a far greater jump than that required from other EU members, which
were already producing much more of their power from renewables such as
hydro-electric schemes.
In
practice, there is no conceivable way we could hope to achieve Huhne’s
plan for 30,000 turbines. It would mean building 11 giant ones every day
for the next six years, which is completely out of the question.
But
that has not prevented Mr Davey and his colleagues from trying. And, in
doing so, they are offering the mainly foreign-owned firms that build
those wind farms subsidies which are higher than those available
anywhere else in the world.
For
onshore turbines, Davey is prepared to give wind farm owners a subsidy
of nearly 100 per cent on top of the market rate for electricity.
However,
subsidies for electricity provided by offshore wind farms is now more
than twice as much - which is why firms from Germany, France, Sweden and
other countries have been rushing to cash in on Britain’s unique
subsidy bonanza.
But
all this creates yet another huge practical problem that Mr Davey does
his best to keep from public view. This is the fact that the more wind
farms those subsidies call into being, the more we must look to
conventional power stations to provide back-up for whenever the wind
speed varies.
At
the moment, by far the cheapest source of electricity is coal, still
providing more than a third of our power and costing six times less than
what we get from Mr Davey’s subsidised offshore wind farms.
But
Mr Davey and his predecessors have been steadily closing down what they
see as those dreadful, polluting, CO2-emitting coal-fired power
stations - and the ones that remain are not flexible enough to provide
the instant back-up needed to keep our lights on whenever the wind
drops.
The
more wind farms we build, the more we will need gas-fired power
stations to provide that instantly available back-up, not just to keep
our lights on but to keep our computer-dependent economy running at all.
And
guess who is going to have to pay to keep those gas-fired plants
permanently and expensively running on stand-by for when they are
needed, chucking out more of Mr Davey’s hated CO2 than is saved by all
his wind farms? We are, of course, through our electricity bills.
We
are looking here at the makings of a national catastrophe: one that
will not just push our electricity bills through the roof, but could
well lead to major power cuts and blackouts.
This
will be the price we pay for a bout of collective insanity over
renewable energy, for which it is hard to think of any historical
parallel. It truly is time we woke up to the reality of where this
crazed obsession with wind turbines is leading us.
Rather like the mammoth new Rampion offshore wind farm, when it comes to our policy on wind farms, Britain really is all at sea.
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