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Does money grow in wind farms?
(The Telegraph 13 Jun 2010 Andrew Gilligan)
Wind turbines are
a poor way to harness energy - but a very good way to generate
public subsidies, says Andrew Gilligan. From the summit of
Plynlimon, in the deep country of the Cambrian Mountains,
there is a 70-mile panorama of the Cader range, hill after
green-blue hill stretching into the distance, from the peaks
around Bala to the shores of Cardigan Bay. It was a view that
caught the breath. It still does, in a different way. The
view from Plynlimon now is of more than 200 wind turbines,
nearly a tenth of Britain’s onshore total, stretching
across ridge-lines, dominating near and far horizons. The
author George Borrow wrote a whole chapter on Plynlimon in
his classic 19th-century travelogue, Wild Wales. It’s
not so wild these days.
Last week’s
decision by Miriam González Durántez, wife of
the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, to join a leading wind-farm
company has thrown the spotlight on one of Britain’s
most controversial industries. Mrs Durántez’s
firm, Acciona, is seeking planning permission to add another
23 wind turbines to the view from Plynlimon, filling up some
of the remaining skyline not yet occupied by them.
To opponents, land-based
wind-turbines – there are currently 2,560 – are,
in the words of the chairman of the National Trust, Simon
Jenkins, “creatures from the War of the Worlds”,
industrialising the countryside, invading precious landscapes.
Supporters are no less high-pitched. At the annual conference
of the wind farm trade body, the BWEA, John Prescott, Mr Clegg’s
predecessor, stormed: “We cannot let the squires and
the gentry stop us meeting our moral obligation to pass this
world on in a better state to our children. So let me tell
them loud and clear: it’s not your backyard any more
– it’s ours!” The then energy and climate
change secretary, now Labour leadership contender, Ed Miliband,
said that it “should be socially unacceptable to be
against wind turbines in your area – like not wearing
your seatbelt”. Yet like so much else in the climate
change debate, the emotions – on both sides –
get in the way. Presenting wind farms as either an alien scourge
or a moral crusade obscures what is surely the real question:
are they effective at reducing CO2 emissions? Do the benefits
they bring outweigh the costs they impose? Last year, Mr Miliband
announced that renewables – very largely wind –
would be expected to provide “over 30 per cent”
of the UK’s electricity by 2020, as part of ambitious
new Europe-wide targets.
The BWEA, recently renamed Renewables UK, is confident about
the potential. “The UK is the windiest country in Europe,
so much so that we could power the country several times over
using this free fuel,” it says, describing Britain as
the “Saudi Arabia of wind”. RUK says that “every
unit of electricity from a wind turbine displaces one from
conventional power stations”, and even the existing
wind turbines have “the capacity to prevent the emission
of 3.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum”.
The key weasel word in that last sentence is “capacity”.
The CO2 reduction figure assumes that all wind turbines are
able to generate electricity to 100 per cent of their capacity,
100 per cent of the time. But the basic problem with wind
power is that most of the time, the wind does not blow. A
typical commercial turbine needs a wind speed of between 6-10mph
to start operating – and automatically stops when the
wind is more than around 55mph, to protect its mechanisms.
Even when the wind is blowing between those speeds, it –
and therefore the amount of electricity generated –
is variable, and usually below the turbine’s full theoretical
capacity. According to government figures, the average wind
turbine operates to just 27 per cent of its capacity –
even the industry only claims 30 per cent – and there
are some grounds for suggesting that even this is a significant
exaggeration. Professor Michael Jefferson, of the London Metropolitan
Business School, says that in 2008 less than a fifth of onshore
wind farms achieved 30 per cent capacity.
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