Wind farms: millionaire playgrounds for Green fat cats

ENERGY policy in Great Britain has been a shambles for years. Cowardly governments have turned a blind eye to repeated warnings over prices and supply.

The official line from London and Brussels has always been that wind turbines produce energy more cleanly and cheaply than any conventional alternatives ever could. Try telling that to the inhabitants of the Scottish island of Lewis, who are currently fighting Amec, an engineering consultancy, and British Energy, a giant electricity group. Both are intent on converting the tiny Hebridean Island into one of the world’s largest wind farms. Aside from how 181 turbines covering the northern half of the island will look, the farm will upset Lewis’ fragile ecology, and spell disaster for numerous rare animals. There is a grim irony to the island’s predicament: “environmentally-friendly” measures threatening to visit irreparable damage upon a natural environment.

The real solution to Britain’s energy problems is much more nuclear power, not wind. Until now, coal, oil and North Sea gas have provided most of Britain’s electricity. But thanks to increasingly stringent environmental regulations, coal is becoming much more expensive (ensuring that carbon dioxide is captured at source through chimney-scrubbing technology will skew the cost argument more in favour of nuclear); and with supplies of North Sea gas running out, Britain will be forced to rely on imported natural gas to produce its electricity, much of it coming from some of the most unstable and unsavoury regions of the world, including autocratic Russia.

The Lewis case is rightly triggering a long-overdue debate in Britain about wind power. Even the military is having its say (wind turbines block radar signals, creating “holes” in the national defence network). But the most devastating case against wind farms is to be found in Christopher Booker and Richard North’s recent book, Scared to Death.

The facts are clear: the United Kingdom’s 165 wind farms have failed to deliver on their promises: they are not significantly cleaner; they are certainly not cheaper; and they are already draining the pockets of the consumer, hitting the poor and needy hardest of all.

Wind is, by its very nature, unreliable: sometimes it blows, sometimes it doesn’t. So wind farms sometimes produce a surfeit of electricity; and sometimes they produce next-to-nothing. There needs to be a contingency plan, lest consumers be left without electricity when the wind turbines stop turning. So coal-fired power stations are kept running in the background, ready to step into the breach at a moment’s notice. The CO2 emissions generated by keeping these power-stations on stand-by aren’t counted in the “carbon reduction” totals for wind farms. At best this is an oversight; at worst it’s grand hypocrisy – the big business equivalent of cycling to work while a car follows behind, carrying your bags.