We need to talk about wind farms…
by John on July 29, 2010
in Climate scam
Written by James Delingpole, Telegraph (UK) 28 July 2010
“Energy prices may rise by a third,” says our disastrous secretary of state of energy and climate change Chris Huhne. Rubbish. They’re going to rise by a hell of a lot more than that before he is finished. Alternative energy, let us never forget, is just that: an alternative to energy. Wind power and solar power are so risibly inefficient that the only way they can ever be economically viable is with lashings and lashings of taxpayer subsidy. Nuclear power would be much more effective but Huhne has effectively ruled it out. Why? Because in Huhne’s bizarre Weltanschauung, it’s OK for the taxpayer to subsidise low-carbon energy that doesn’t work (wind, solar) but not low-carbon energy that does work (nuclear).
But it’s not Huhne’s breathtaking hypocrisy, ignorance and eco-fanaticism I want to talk about today. Rather I want to focus on just one aspect of it: his plan to carpet Britain in wind farms. What I should like to know is how many of you are with me on this one. It seems to me that at the moment we are sleepwalking towards the greatest environmental disaster of our lifetimes: in the name of alleviating something distant and imaginary – “Climate Change” – our government is now committed to the destruction of the British landscape. And what I’m not sensing, yet, is any kind of serious, concerted resistance.
We need a figurehead. (Not me, unfortunately. I ain’t got the time or the fame or the diplomatic skills.) We need somebody who can galvanise ordinary British people into saving their countryside before it’s too late. Ideally that figurehead would have been the Prince of Wales. But as I explained in last week’s Spectator the Prince has rather ruled himself out of that one. Alan Titchmarsh? He’s the only name that immediately springs to mind, but perhaps you can suggest others.
Next we need money to counter all the propaganda which is spewed out, much of it at taxpayer’s expense of course, by quangos like the Carbon Trust, by schools, by organisations like Renewable UK (formerly the British Wind Energy Association) – each of them repeating the same fundamental lies: that CO2 is a pollutant (not a plant food); that Man-Made Climate Change is a serious, pressing threat; that wind farms are the solution.
Above all, though, we need to stop kidding ourselves that if only we concentrate on how thoroughly marvellous Michael Gove is or what a splendid idea elected police chiefs are, this nasty, scary energy policy our Coalition has decided to foist on us will somehow magically evaporate. At the moment, we seem to be allowing their spokesmen to get away with all manner of nonsense, such as:
1. Britain needs to set an example on CO2 reduction.
No it doesn’t. At least not unless you believe in futile, suicidal gestures. China’s burgeoning CO2 output alone is more than enough to wipe out any paltry emissions Britain makes by going “low carbon”.
2. It will create green jobs.
Only in places like China, where the wind turbines are manufactured. There will be no benefits to the British economy, just a disastrous replay of the Spanish experience where for every “green job” created by government subsidy, 2.2 jobs were lost in the real economy.
3. It will provide “energy security”.
No it won’t. Because wind power is so unreliable, it has to be backed up by conventional power such as coal or gas. If energy security is really what we want we should go for more coal-fired power. We are, after all, sitting on an island of coal.
4. It doesn’t destroy property values, ruin views, chop birds to pieces, or create a low subsonic hum which drives anyone unfortunate to live by a wind farm mad.
Yep. Sounds like you’ve been taking your daily dose of propaganda from the likes of Renewable UK and Polly Toynbee, who thinks wind farms are rather attractive.
5. The future is low carbon.
Says who? What we need, now more than ever, is cheap power to generate the economic growth the world needs to lift itself out of the looming double-dip recession. Low carbon energy is, by definition, not cheap.
6. But what about “climate change”?
What about it? If it’s “global warming” you’re worried about, it stopped in 1998. Global cooling is a much more imminent and serious problem. Recent changes in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation mean that we’re now set for a 30 year cooling period guaranteed to make a mockery of all our fears about “global warming.” Yet here we are, embarked on a policy guaranteed to raise our energy bills to unaffordable levels, as we enter a period of colder winters.
This nonsense has got to stop. People, are you with me?
(UK) 28 July 2010
“What is truly terrifying about Mr Huhne as our energy minister is that he seems so astonishingly ignorant about even the most basic principles of how electricity is produced.
He boasts about how the 3,000 wind turbines we have already built have the ‘capacity’ to generate 4.5 gigawatts of electricity.
Capacity is the crucial word here. As he could see from figures on his own department’s website, thanks to the fact that the wind blows only intermittently, the amount of power these windmills actually produce is barely a quarter of that.
In other words, the amount of electricity generated by all those turbines put together, at a cost of billions of pounds, is no more than that provided by a single medium-size conventional power station - equivalent to a mere two per cent of the electricity we need.
He then talks about how we must build thousands more turbines around our coasts - when, as any responsible civil servant in his ministry could tell him, there is no way we could hope to build more than a fraction of the number he is dreaming of, even if we had all the money in the world.
The target set by the last government would require us, at a cost of £100 billion, to erect nearly two of these monster turbines, each the size of Blackpool Tower, every day of every week for the next ten years - when each takes weeks to manufacture and sink into the seabed.
But even if Mr Huhne could make his dream come true, that would still supply on average only five more gigawatts of electricity, less than a tenth of our needs.
Meanwhile, to keep the lights on, a whole lot more gas-fired power stations would have to be built - and kept running, pumping out CO2 - simply to be ready to be ramped up to fill the gap when the wind stops blowing.
The Huhne solution to producing Britain’s energy is naivete verging on madness.
But, most disturbingly of all, Mr Huhne is so infatuated with wind power that he seems to have convinced himself that, in cash terms, it is ‘intensely competitive’ with other means of making electricity.
To make such a claim makes me believe that he’s never done a moment’s homework on the actual cost of wind power.
Allowing for the cost of those vital back-up plants, it is twice as expensive as gas, coal or nuclear - while the power from those colossally expensive offshore turbines, costing anything up to £10 million each, is up to three times as costly as that produced by conventional power stations.
If it wasn’t for the 100 per cent subsidy we all unwittingly pay to the developers of wind turbines - through a compulsory levy in our electricity bills - no one would dream of building these ludicrously inefficient machines at all.”
My comment:
This is what the Green wackos want for us in Australia to force us back into a stone age of hunter-gatherers. Feel the crazy?
I cannot agree more with this post John. It says it all. Poor old England where once there were steams, rolling hills and and poetry written about the grand Britannia, there will now be whining ugly wind farms.
Has the world gone crazy? Apparently the Chinese haven’t, they are not having any of it.
Rae, apparently the Californian coast is strewn with rusted-up wind turbines that no longer turn. When they do work hundreds of birds are killed by the blades. This type of ill-advised thinking has helped to bankrupt California.