Why not click here to read an excellent recent article from the CPRE?

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PRESS RELEASE 29 JULY 2010

SAVE OUR SILTON FIGHTS AGAINST ‘MONSTROUS’ WIND TURBINES.

 A NEW campaign is being launched by Save Our Silton (SOS) against the most unpopular planning application Dorset has ever seen – the proposal to build wind turbines near Gillingham.

Two years ago, a record 1,987 people wrote to North Dorset District Council to object to plans to put six giant wind turbines – each 394 ft high – into about 6,000 tonnes of concrete in a Silton field. Supporters numbered just 15. The plan was unanimously rejected by councillors, but developers Ecotricity have now come back with a revised plan for four turbines still 394ft high. These three bladed machines would be the tallest man-made structures in Dorset, higher than the surrounding hills, visible up to 7.5 miles away. SOS is run by villagers.

Chris Langham, SOS chairman, said: ‘It’s like David and Goliath – The Rematch. We hoped that Ecotricity would accept that Silton is simply not a suitable place to put monstrous wind turbines. But they don’t seem to respect what local people say, so we have no choice but to fight. ‘These turbines would be six times as tall as the crane that’s currently being used in Gillingham town centre to build the new retirement flats in Newbury. ‘They would dominate the area – and they would ruin the landscape. ‘They would spoil the lives of local people, they would harm the local economy by driving tourists away, and they wouldn’t even generate much electricity. ‘Silton has below average wind speeds. These turbines would not produce much power but they would grab Ecotricity about £1m a year in subsidy – money that we pay through our ordinary electricity bills. ‘I ask everybody who cares for this part of the world to write to North Dorset District Council and tell the planners – this is a bad scheme. Reject it. Please. We don’t want it. We don’t need it.’

North Dorset District Council has decreed that objections must be received by 23 August. However, SOS has asked for this to be extended. All comments must cite the application’s number, which is 2/2010/0731/PLNG and go to Development Control Manager, North Dorset District Council, Nordon, Salisbury Road, Blandford Forum, Dorset, DT11 7LL. SOS members have also begun writing up accounts of their lives as protestors in a blog on the group’s website.

Tim and Debbie Allard and their two sons own a farm less than a kilometre from the proposed turbine site. Theirs is the fourth generation of the family to farm here. In 2006, they took out a large loan to build two holiday cottages in this idyllic, peaceful site. The cottages have been a great success - but their guests have been unanimous in their view that they would not consider returning if the turbines are built. They would spoil the whole reason for coming. Debbie said: ‘This would be ruinous for us and for the other holiday businesses in the area. We've invested our life savings in the cottages and couldn't survive here if the business goes under.’

NOTES TO EDITORS: To arrange interviews, photographs, or filming opportunities, or to seek further information, please contact Emily Pykett at Watershed PR. Telephone: 01308 420 785 or emily@watershedpr.co.uk   Out of office mobile: 07966 259823

ENDS

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An excellent and informative article on the sole owner of Ecotricity:

Sunday Telegraph 20 June 2010: "The 'hippy' wind farm tycoon receiving millions in subsidies."

 With a fortune estimated at close to £100 million, Dale Vince, a former hippy who once lived in a truck, is probably Britain's most successful eco-tycoon.

The self-styled 'Zero Carbonista' has made his money – make that lots of money – from a wind farm empire that stretches from Somerset to Scotland. Not everybody is delighted by his financial acumen, however. Vocal critics complain that his company's rapid growth is one of the most glaring examples of the huge sums that can be earned from the generous subsidies available to wind farm owners. An energy think tank has concluded that in a 12-month period, Mr Vince's 14 wind farms have received more than £6.3 million in subsidies. In total over the past eight years his company Ecotricity will have received more than £22.6 million – a sum which is effectively added on to consumer electricity bills.

Should Ecotricity manage to put into operation all the wind farms it is currently planning, the annual subsidy will rise to close to £25 million, according to the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF), an organisation opposed to onshore wind farms. The subsidy – known as the Renewable Obligation Certificate (ROC) system – was put in place by the previous Government to encourage energy companies to invest in renewable energy. But opponents claim the levy is overly generous and is encouraging a rapid growth of wind turbines in some of Britain's loveliest stretches of countryside. They even suggest the ROC subsidy is leading to wind farms being built in areas where the wind is not necessarily that strong.

Margareta Stanley, REF's spokeswoman, said: "The Renewable Energy Foundation has long argued that the ROC system has rewarded the wind industry with an income disproportionate to the quality and usefulness of the power produced ... The income of companies such as Ecotricity demonstrates this distortion." In the village of Silton in Dorset, local opponents to a planned Ecotricity wind farm on their doorstep blamed the subsidy for making the scheme economically viable.

"This is a very inappropriate site for a wind farm," said Chris Langham, chairman of the Save Our Silton campaign, "The ROC system is hugely generous which means that companies like Ecotricity can make wind farms profitable even in places where there is very little wind." Certainly Ecotricity is doing very well. According to the latest accounts for Ecotricity Group Limited, which is the holding and management company, turnover was up 36 per cent to £38 million for the year ending 30 April 2009. Gross profit was £15.4 million.

Mr Vince, 48, who prefers ripped jeans and a biker jacket to a business suit, is one of the most flamboyant and charismatic figures in the energy industry. His internet blog is titled Zero Carbonista and is accompanied by a photograph of Mr Vince in a style reminiscent of Che Guevara. Although a relatively small player compared to the huge conglomerates who dominate the industry, his rise has nevertheless been spectacular. As recently as the early 1990s, Mr Vince was, according to his own website, "living on a hill, in an ex-military vehicle I called home, using a small windmill to power the lights and stuff". He had the brilliant idea of developing wind farms and has built up his empire since then.

In 2004 he was awarded an OBE for services to the environment and now lives in a wing of a country house on the edge of Stroud, headquarters to the company he founded and still owns in its entirety. Within the next few months, he plans to unveil a new type of electric sports car, capable of top speeds well in excess of 100 miles per hour and which he hopes will transform the staid image of electric cars. One high-earners' list estimates his wealth at £90 million.

Mr Vince refused to talk to The Sunday Telegraph. But his spokesman pointed out that Mr Vince has said on many occasions he is not interested in money – only in providing renewable energy alternatives to old-fashioned, polluting fossil fuels. According to company accounts, Mr Vince is paid £65,000 a year as director of the company. "Dale has said he couldn't care less about money," explained his spokesman, "We have been approached by all the big utility companies as well as the likes of Shell and BP but he has told them all he has no interest in selling." The spokesman refused to discuss REF's estimates for the size of ROC subsidies received by Ecotricity. The spokesman added: "I don't know whether those figures are entirely accurate. "Their figures in isolation may sound like a lot but we are talking about major pieces of infrastructure. We spent £25 million in 2007 alone on building new sources of wind power. That puts their figures a little more into contrext."

RenewableUK, the trade association for the wind farm industry, defended the ROC subsidy. "It is a good system," said spokesman Charles Anglin, "The point about ROCs is you can only get financial support for the electricity you produce. It is not a subsidy in the traditional sense. It is an incentive to be efficient."

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 September 2009: Blog by Roger Helmer MEP on wind energy in Denmark. The blog can also be found on the internet, at http://rogerhelmermep.wordpress.com/2009/09/19/wind-energy-the-case-of-denmark/


Wind Energy: The Case of Denmark

With the British government planning to obtain up to 35% of UK generating capacity from wind turbines by 2020, it is instructive to consider the case of Denmark, one of the few countries that has got anywhere near that level.

Denmark generates the equivalent of around 19% of its electricity demand from wind, which on the face of it sounds like a great achievement. But because wind is intermittent and unpredictable, wind power sometimes meets as little as 5% of Denmark's demand, with an average over the last five years of only about 9.7% -- approximately half of the theoretical level.

Because electricity can't be stored in volume, wind can sometimes deliver too much energy that can't be used (for example if the wind blows strongly at night when demand is low). This creates entirely new challenges for transmission system operators. In the case of Denmark, about half of all the wind energy generated cannot be used, and has to be exported, below cost, to Sweden, Germany and Norway.

This brings considerable benefits to consumers in those countries, at the expense of Danish consumers and tax-payers. It is estimated that exported subsidies from Denmark amounted to €916 million between 2001 and 2008. Not surprisingly, Denmark's commitment to wind means that Danish consumers have the most expensive electricity in the EU. You may think that at least Danish wind-power is saving CO2 emissions in Sweden and Norway, but not so, because those countries rely heavily on hydro power, rather than fossil fuel generation.

Wind power has saved some CO2 emissions in Denmark, but at a very high cost of €87 per ton. For comparison, investment in building insulation can save CO2 emissions for between €10 and €20 per ton.

British estimates of the cost of wind power typically assume a 25 year working life for turbines. But the Danes are finding that ten to fifteen years is more realistic -- massively increasing the already high cost of wind generation. We are promised that green energy initiatives will increase employment. In Denmark this has proved to be the case, but the net new employment is small, and the cost-per-job in terms of subsidy is estimated at between 175% and 250% of the average worker's wage in Danish manufacturing industry. In terms both of power generation and job creation, wind power is fantastically costly and inefficient. Wind power investment and subsidy have had the effect of moving employment from more productive sectors in Denmark into the less productive wind industry, which has had a negative effect on Danish GDP.

There are lessons here for the UK. Our Labour government has naively assumed that if we build enough wind farms to deliver 35% of our electricity requirements, then that is what we shall get. The Danish experience suggests that we may be able to use only half of it; that it will fail to deliver the anticipated emissions savings or significant net new employment; and that it will damage prosperity and growth. We have been warned.

Source: The Danish Center for Politiske Studier (Centre for Policy Studies), Sept 2009; www.cepos.dk

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FINANCIAL POST (Toronto) April 08, 2009

Wind power is a complete disaster
Posted: April 08, 2009, 7:29 PM by
NP Editor wind power, Michael J. Trebilcock

By Michael J. Trebilcock

There is no evidence that industrial wind power is likely to have a significant impact on carbon emissions. The European experience is instructive. Denmark, the world’s most wind-intensive nation, with more than 6,000 turbines generating 19% of its electricity, has yet to close a single fossil-fuel plant. It requires 50% more coal-generated electricity to cover wind power’s unpredictability, and pollution and carbon dioxide emissions have risen (by 36% in 2006 alone).

Flemming Nissen, the head of development at West Danish generating company ELSAM (one of Denmark’s largest energy utilities) tells us that “wind turbines do not reduce carbon dioxide emissions.” The German experience is no different. Der Spiegel reports that “Germany’s CO2 emissions haven’t been reduced by even a single gram,” and additional coal- and gas-fired plants have been constructed to ensure reliable delivery.

Indeed, recent academic research shows that wind power may actually increase greenhouse gas emissions in some cases, depending on the carbon-intensity of back-up generation required because of its intermittent character. On the negative side of the environmental ledger are adverse impacts of industrial wind turbines on birdlife and other forms of wildlife, farm animals, wetlands and viewsheds.

Industrial wind power is not a viable economic alternative to other energy conservation options. Again, the Danish experience is instructive. Its electricity generation costs are the highest in Europe (15¢/kwh compared to Ontario’s current rate of about 6¢). Niels Gram of the Danish Federation of Industries says, “windmills are a mistake and economically make no sense.” Aase Madsen , the Chair of Energy Policy in the Danish Parliament, calls it “a terribly expensive disaster.”

The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported in 2008, on a dollar per MWh basis, the U.S. government subsidizes wind at $23.34 — compared to reliable energy sources: natural gas at 25¢; coal at 44¢; hydro at 67¢; and nuclear at $1.59, leading to what some U.S. commentators call “a huge corporate welfare feeding frenzy.” The Wall Street Journal advises that “wind generation is the prime example of what can go wrong when the government decides to pick winners.”

The Economist magazine notes in a recent editorial, “Wasting Money on Climate Change,” that each tonne of emissions avoided due to subsidies to renewable energy such as wind power would cost somewhere between $69 and $137, whereas under a cap-and-trade scheme the price would be less than $15.

Either a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system creates incentives for consumers and producers on a myriad of margins to reduce energy use and emissions that, as these numbers show, completely overwhelm subsidies to renewables in terms of cost effectiveness.

The Ontario Power Authority advises that wind producers will be paid 13.5¢/kwh (more than twice what consumers are currently paying), even without accounting for the additional costs of interconnection, transmission and back-up generation. As the European experience confirms, this will inevitably lead to a dramatic increase in electricity costs with consequent detrimental effects on business and employment. From this perspective, the government’s promise of 55,000 new jobs is a cruel delusion.

A recent detailed analysis (focusing mainly on Spain) finds that for every job created by state-funded support of renewables, particularly wind energy, 2.2 jobs are lost. Each wind industry job created cost almost $2-million in subsidies. Why will the Ontario experience be different?

In debates over climate change, and in particular subsidies to renewable energy, there are two kinds of green. First there are some environmental greens who view the problem as so urgent that all measures that may have some impact on greenhouse gas emissions, whatever their cost or their impact on the economy and employment, should be undertaken immediately.

Then there are the fiscal greens, who, being cool to carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems that make polluters pay, favour massive public subsidies to themselves for renewable energy projects, whatever their relative impact on greenhouse gas emissions. These two groups are motivated by different kinds of green. The only point of convergence between them is their support for massive subsidies to renewable energy (such as wind turbines).

This unholy alliance of these two kinds of greens (doomsdayers and rent seekers) makes for very effective, if opportunistic, politics (as reflected in the Ontario government’s Green Energy Act), just as it makes for lousy public policy: Politicians attempt to pick winners at our expense in a fast-moving technological landscape, instead of creating a socially efficient set of incentives to which we can all respond.

Financial Post
Michael J. Trebilcock is Professor of Law and Economics, University of Toronto. These comments were excerpted from a submission last night to the Ontario government’s legislative committee On Bill 150.

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Article by Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times, 19th July 2009:

When wind blows, jobs will fall

You may recall the Beyond the Fringe sketch in which Squadron Leader Peter Cook tells Jonathan Miller, the doleful pilot, that he must set out on a doomed mission because “we need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war”.

I was irresistibly reminded of this by Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, in his launch of plans to cut carbon emissions by switching to “renewables” for more than 30% of our energy use. This, he claimed, would “rise to the moral challenge of climate change”.

Miliband is of the generation of politicians struggling to find a great moral cause. Earlier in the Labour administration Tony Blair thought he had found it with wars of choice far from home, but that has, to put it mildly, lost its lustre. Now it is the “war against climate change”, given additional moral potency by the notion that the greatest concentration of sufferers from global rising temperatures would be among the world’s poorest.

Miliband’s citing of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in support of his policy of subsidising the construction of many thousands of otherwise uneconomic wind turbines might appear grotesque, even comical; but not if you genuinely believe that Britain’s switching from coal to wind power for its electricity generation will save the lives of countless Africans.

I have no idea whether Miliband truly believes that it will - but if he does, he is deluded. The UK is responsible for less than 2% of global carbon emissions - a figure set to fall sharply, regardless of what we do, as a result of the startlingly rapid industrial-isation of countries such as China and India: each year the increase in Chinese CO2 emissions alone is greater than those produced by the entire British economy. On the fashionable assumption that climate change is entirely driven by CO2 emissions, the effect on global temperatures of Britain closing every fossil fuel power station would be much smaller than the statistical margin of error: in effect, zero.

The scientists at the energy and climate change department know this, but their political masters see things differently. Gordon Brown claims: “Britain is leading the world in the battle against climate change.” Such remarks are regarded as absurd in the chancelleries of Europe: if you do take as a measure of such commitment the proportion of domestic energy already supplied by renewables, the UK occupies 25th place in the European Union league table, above only Malta and Luxembourg.

Nevertheless, there is one great merit in being a follower rather than a leader in renewable energy: we can see how other European countries have fared in the experiment. Germany has long been subsidising wind power to the extent of almost €5 billion a year. Yet recent German Green party internal e-mails leaked to Der Spiegel magazine show this has not led to a reduction of a single gram of CO2 emitted on the continent of Europe. The much-vaunted emissions trading system is one reason: Germany’s unused certificates were snapped up at negligible cost by coal producers in countries such as Poland and Slovakia, which were thus able to increase their output of greenhouse gases.

There is a second reason, which would remain even if the European emissions trading system were to be scrapped. Because the wind blows intermittently, and may be at its calmest at times of freezing weather, Germany has not been able to close a single one of its conventional power stations, despite its vast investment in wind power.

Indeed, Paul Golby, who runs the British operations of E.ON, Europe’s biggest wind-power producer, has told the government that a 90% fossil fuel or nuclear back-up will be needed for any of the National Grid’s future wind-power capacity. As Martin Fuchs, his German boss, pointed out: “The wind, sadly, does not blow where large quantities of power are required . . . on September 12 last year wind power contributed 38% of our grid power requirements at all times, but on September 30 the figure went down to 0.2%.”

The powerful wind-turbine lobby in Germany constantly harps on about the number of jobs “created” by its subsidised investment, quite ignoring the number of jobs destroyed by high-cost energy, or indeed the greater number of jobs that could be created if the same amounts were invested in more profitable activities. This is why the Bremen Energy Institute argues that “wind energy macro-economically has a negative employment impact”.

Given the run-down state of our conventional generating capacity, it is easy to see that the government’s suspiciously round number of a “£100 billion” expenditure on installing 7,000 offshore steel structures, each the height of Blackpool Tower, at a projected rate of more than two every working day over the next decade, does not begin to cover the real cost. This is why the overall price of wind energy is a multiple of that incurred by nuclear power, which is equally carbon-free but does not appeal to the moral vanity of politicians.

Admittedly, the Labour government has made a belated commitment to replacing our ageing nuclear reactors – far too late to fill the yawning energy gap that Britain faces in the coming decade. As Professor Ian Fells points out in the new Civitas pamphlet Nations Choose Prosperity: “The energy agenda is focused on carbon emissions rather than security of supply and potential costs. What is rarely considered is the consequential costs when power cuts are inflicted.” These costs are not just measured in the collapse of business, but also in human lives, especially of the elderly and infirm.

Miliband claimed last week that the result of his proposals would be an increase in costs to energy users of about 17%. However, the business and enterprise department admitted last year that Britain’s existing “climate policies” - even before Miliband’s latest Big New Idea - would add an extra 55% to energy bills. It’s obvious where this will lead: to the exit from Britain (and, indeed, Europe) of much of what remains of energy-intensive manufacturing industry - the euphemistic jargon term is “carbon leakage”.

Jeremy Nicholson, the director of the Energy Intensive Users Group, which represents such industries as steel and aluminium, is exasperated beyond measure: “A future administration will have to say in public what ministers and their officials already admit in private, that the renewables target is neither practical nor affordable. Outsourcing our emissions is not a solution to a global problem. Politicians need to understand that unilateral action will come at a terrible cost in terms of UK manufacturing jobs, investment and export revenue, for no discernible environmental gain - is that really what they want?”

On the day Nicholson said this to me, last Thursday, Anglesey Aluminium, the biggest consumer of electricity in Wales, announced that it would cease production, precisely because it could see no prospect of signing up to a long-term supply of electricity at a rate at which it could make a profit. And on the day of Miliband’s announcement, a group of Labour MPs presented a “Save Our Steel” petition, saying: “We need to make sure we act before the light goes out.”

It may well be that the English steel mills will become unable to compete globally, even at current domestic energy prices; but deliberately to make them uncompetitive is industrial vandalism - and even madness when the consequence of Miliband’s Martin Luther King moment may be the lights going out not just for producers but for all of us in our homes. This is worse than a futile gesture: it is immoral.

dominic.lawson@sunday-times.co.uk

Ecotowns and turbines are a political slap in the face of the landscape.

Simon Jenkins
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 16 July 2009 21.00 BST 

The British government is to permit the desecration of upland and coastal Britain in the hope that this will shift the climatic balance of Planet Earth. All past plans and protections are being torn up. Markets are being distorted. Local democracy is to be abandoned. Extraordinary sums of money are given to private firms and individuals. The issue is not national security or prosperity but a hope somehow to prevent a long-term rise in the level of the sea.

Where huge sums of public money are at stake, reason is shoved aside and arguments degenerate into crude politics. Climate change is like defence during the cold war, enveloped in hysteria of fear, envy, class, greed, commercial interest and intellectual chicanery. As big anti-carbon replaces big carbon in the lobbying stakes, statistics become gibberish, millions become billions and megawatts become gigawatts submerged in tonnes of CO2.

Yesterday the government announced four so-called ecotowns, as if communities were created at the stroke a ministerial pen. New ecotown is close to a contradiction in terms. The emphasis is not on conservation but on anything involving ground-breaking, construction and fees. Like Yvette Cooper's urban Pathfinder clearances, ecotowns ignore the social dysfunctionality of new towns and are carbon extravagant, built from scratch with new infrastructure for car-dependent commuters.

These arguments are not about global warming but about politics. Demand the conservation of existing communities and landscape and you will be told that new settlements are "about consumer choice", as the Co-op, hopeful developer of a Leicestershire ecotown, said yesterday. Even some greens have disowned ecotowns as nothing but executive housing estates refashioned.

The wind debate is no less dominated by a mix of politics and commerce. Turbine parks require excavating carbon sinks, concreting them and making and installing turbines and pylons, usually to distribute small, even trivial, amounts of intermittent electricity. Yet the argument is now symbolic.

Sacrificing the Lake District, the Golden Valley, the Scottish islands, even the Wiltshire vales is like Aztecs killing virgins, evidence of the machismo of power in a godly cause. This is enhanced by a rerun of town/country antagonism, with metropolitan journalists shouting nimby at their country cousins (there being no danger of a power station on Hyde Park or Clapham Common).

Both left and right are now roaming the land looking for places to anchor their guns. On the left, wind, trains, ships and ecotowns are good while cars, planes, trucks and coal are bad. On the right the vote goes to nuclear, solar and conservation. Turbines are in one month and out the next, barrages out then in. If the word sustainable can be slapped before any noun, it is sanctified. An opponent is never wrong – since in this debate facts are garbage – but hypocritical or a nimby.

I know of no better symbol of this idiocy than the single giant turbine now towering over the Mendips. Its meagre output is not even worth a pylon, yet it is a totemic slap in the face of the landscape by a farmer in league with the exchequer. It would never be allowed in the Chilterns or Cotswolds – but this is about politics, not energy conservation.

Likewise the ban-the-bombers have found a new cause in opposing nuclear power. Some would do so even if it were blessed by the Archangel Gabriel or, as in this case, by the green guru, James Lovelock.

Meanwhile not a kilowatt is derived from the massive energy surging back and forth across estuarial Britain, because the start-up costs are high and there is no lobby for the rental subsidies that have made British onshore wind the most expensive energy source on earth. Water cascades unharnessed down mountains. Buildings leak energy. Vehicles sit burning fuel at badly phased traffic lights. Nobody cares because such energy conservation does not sit on an annual report like a photograph of a turbine.

Navigating a course through the climate change debate is near impossible because of this noise. Ministers rushed to wind because it offered a photogenic quick fix. Its exorbitant cost-per-unit could be partly disguised in energy bills and its opponents could be dismissed as rural hicks. At the same time, in 2004, Blair was deriding nuclear power stations to parliament by joking that if a questioner kept talking about nuclear he would "put a power station in your constituency".

My own belief is that the quest for reduced carbon emissions must lie in conserving every drop of energy on land – especially that "buried" in existing buildings and open space – and capturing every drop of energy in the sunny sky and surging sea. But there are no magic bullets. Some balance of cost and benefit must be assessed other than by those with a commercial or political interest.

To every climate change argument there is an answer. Despoiling the landscape may generate some fraction of what is claimed but people will burn more fuel travelling farther in search of wildness. New towns may be fuel efficient, but require increased car use. Turbines, barrages and nuclear stations have their part to play, but there is no point in denying they are visually intrusive. That is why they must be tested against the concept of outstanding natural beauty which the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, now decries.

The current anger at the march of turbines and pylons across the hills of Britain is not from nimbys. Government money has lubricated most backyard owners to support wind power. It comes from those who appreciate the beauty of the countryside and who question the industrial spoliation of miles of open landscape for a pitiful net gain to climate change. They are people who object to ministers lying about "20%" of Britain's energy ever coming from wind. Nuclear power stations, barrages and solar panels are at least less intrusive and more productive.

Such a balance goes by the board under an avalanche of subsidy. I am told of a recent meeting in Whitehall at which a junior minister and a minor civil servant were up against some two dozen people from the renewables lobby – mostly in energy and construction – all demanding public money and planning easements with varying degrees of political menace. It was no contest. Fifty years of democratic town and country planning were swept aside.

Lobbyists playing the global salvation card are like policemen playing national security as a way to dodge the democratic process. It is the default mode of modern politics and is brainless accountability. Miliband may not care for the British uplands – despite their being the largest carbon sink in the land – but I sense that most Britons do.

To secure a short-term sacrifice for a long-term gain requires people to be persuaded, not just terrorised into submission. This applies to wind power as well as to nuclear, to planning as well as to conservation, to taxation as well as to subsidy. For the moment, amid the clamour and the greed, I hear no still small voice of reason.

simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk

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 Wind farms will be a monument to an age when our leaders collectively went off their heads Last updated at 7:54 AM on 15th July 2009. (Christopher Booker - Daily Mail)

 Let us be clear: Britain is facing an unprecedented crisis. Before long, we will lose 40 per cent of our generating capacity. And unless we come up quickly with an alternative, the lights WILL go out. Not before time, the Confederation of British Industry yesterday waded in, warning the Government it must abandon its crazy fixation with wind turbines as a way of plugging this forthcoming shortfall and instead urgently focus on far more efficient ways to meet the threat of a permanent, nationwide black-out.

There are a few contenders for the title of the maddest thing that has happened in our lifetime. But a front-runner must be the way in which politicians of all parties have been seduced by the La-La Land promises of the wind power lobby. If you still haven't made your mind up about wind power, just consider some of the inescapable facts - facts which the Government and the wind industry do their best to hide from us all.

So far we have spent billions of pounds on building just over 2,000 wind turbines - and yet they contribute barely one per cent of all the electricity that we need. The combined output of all those 2,000 turbines put together, averaging 700 megawatts, is less than that of a single, medium-sized conventional power station. What's more, far from being 'free', this pitiful dribble of electricity is twice as expensive as the power we get from the nuclear, gas or coal-fired power stations which currently supply well over 90 per cent of our needs - and we all pay the difference, without knowing it, through our electricity bills.

But despite its best efforts to conceal the fact that wind turbines expensively and unreliably generate only a derisory amount of electricity, the Government keeps on telling us of its megalomaniac plans to build thousands more of them - at a cost of up to £100billion. The prime reason for this is that we are legally obliged by the European Union to generate 32 per cent of our electricity from 'renewable' sources by 2020. And with just 11 years to go until that deadline, we hope to meet the target by building highly-subsidised wind turbines.

But this is a farce. In fact, as the Government is privately well aware, there is not the faintest hope that we can do anything of the kind - even if we wanted to. Gordon Brown talks airily of building 4,000 offshore turbines by our target date - plus another 3,000 onshore. But this would mean sticking two of these 2,000-ton monsters, each the height of Blackpool Tower, into the seabed every day for the next 11 years. Nowhere in the world has it proved possible to install more than one of them a week. The infrastructure simply isn't there to build more than a fraction of that figure. Furthermore, such are the weather conditions around Britain's coasts that it is only possible to work on these projects for a few months every summer.

Then there are the 3,000 promised onshore turbines - many of which are to be erected in the most beautiful stretches of Britain's countryside. These are meeting with so much local hostility that the Government has continually had to bend the planning rules in order to force them through over the wishes of local communities and the democratic opposition of local councils.

But wind power is not just the pipedream of deluded politicians. As the CBI was trying to warn yesterday, the real disaster of this great wind fantasy is that it has diverted attention from the genuine energy crisis now hurtling towards us at breakneck speed. For while the Government is trying to force a scattering of useless wind turbines through the planning offices, the truth is that the rest of us will lose 40 per cent of our power stations within as little as seven years. If this happens, and we don't have an alternative, our kettles won't boil, our computers won't work and our country will face economic meltdown. There is little hope now of an 11th hour reprieve. Eight of our nine nuclear power stations - which presently supply 20 per cent of our electricity needs - are so old they will have to close. Nine more large coal and oil-fired power plants will also be forced to shut down under an EU anti-pollution directive.

But more alarming still is the astonishing naivete of almost all our politicians when it comes to working out how we are going to fill the 40 per cent shortfall left in their wake. Very belatedly, the Government has said that it wants to see a new generation of nuclear reactors.  Thanks to decades of government neglect, Britain is set to lose nearly half its electricity in six years. Yet there is little hope that any of them can be up and running earlier than 2020. What's more, they will have to be built by foreign-owned companies because, as recently as October 2006, the Government sold off our last world-class nuclear construction company, Westinghouse, to the Japanese at a knockdown price.

At the same time, our Energy And Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, now says he will not allow any new coal-fired power stations to be built unless they have 'carbon capture' - piping off CO2 to bury it in holes in the ground. This technology not only doubles the price of electricity but hasn't even yet been properly developed. And so the only hope of keeping the lights on will be to build dozens more gas-fired power stations - at a time when North Sea gas is fast running out. And then we will be forced to rely on imports from politically unreliable countries such as Russia, at a time when gas prices are likely to be soaring.

In any event, over the past 20 years, our politicians have made an even more unholy shambles of Britain's energy policy than they have of our economy - and the cost, when the chickens come to roost in a few years' time, will be almost unimaginable. The causes of Britain's impending energy crisis are manifold. Michael Heseltine's 1992 'dash for gas', when he closed down most of our remaining coal mines because North Sea gas was still cheap and abundant, and because its CO2 emissions were only half those of coal, was one of them.

But nothing has done more to take the politicians' eye off the ball, egged on by environmentalist groups such as Friends Of The Earth and Greenpeace, than their quite incomprehensible obsession with windmills. For these white elephants can never produce more than a fraction of the electricity we need, and by no means always when we need it - as we saw last winter when, for weeks on end, they were scarcely turning at all. Do politicians never look outside the windows of their centrally-heated offices to see how often the wind is not blowing? The Government has now shovelled so much money in hidden subsidies into the pockets of the turbine companies that the 'wind bonanza', promoted on a host of fraudulent claims, has become one of the greatest scams of our age. But if and when our lights do go out, it will be important to remember just why we got carried away by such a massive blunder. Left with a land blighted with useless towers of metal, we shall look on those windmills as a monument to the age when the politicians of Britain and Europe collectively went completely off their heads.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1199535/CHRISTOPHER-BOOKER-Wind-farms-monument-age-leaders-collectively-went-heads.html#ixzz0LLWGTnSO&D

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SUNDAY TELEGRAPH:

21ST DECEMBER 2008

Promoters overstated the environmental benefit of wind farms
The wind farm industry has been forced to admit that the environmental benefit of wind power in reducing carbon emissions is only half as big as it had previously claimed.

By Patrick Sawer
Last Updated: 8:14AM GMT 21 Dec 2008

It will be regarded as a concession that twice as many wind turbines as previously calculated will be needed to provide the same degree of reduction in Britain's carbon emissions Photo: PA
The British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) has agreed to scale down its calculation for the amount of harmful carbon dioxide emission that can be eliminated by using wind turbines to generate electricity instead of burning fossil fuels such as coal or gas.
The move is a serious setback for the advocates of wind power, as it will be regarded as a concession that twice as many wind turbines as previously calculated will be needed to provide the same degree of reduction in Britain's carbon emissions.
A wind farm industry source admitted: "It's not ideal for us. It's the result of pressure by the anti-wind farm lobby."
For several years the BWEA – which lobbies on behalf of wind power firms – claimed that electricity from wind turbines 'displaces' 860 grams of carbon dioxide emission for every kilowatt hour of electricity generated.
However it has now halved that figure to 430 grams, following discussions with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).
Hundreds of wind farms are being planned across the country, adding to the 198 onshore and offshore farms - a total of 2,389 turbines - already in operation. Another 40 farms are currently under construction.
Experts have previously calculated that to help achieve the Government's aim of saving around 200 million tons of CO2 emissions by 2020 - through generating 15 per cent of the country's electricity from wind power - would require 50,000 wind turbines.
But the new figure for carbon displacement means that twice as many turbines would now be needed to save the same amount of CO2 emissions.
While their advocates regard wind farms as a key part of Britain's fight against climate change, opponents argue they blight the landscape at great financial cost while bringing little environmental benefit.
Dr Mike Hall, an anti-wind farm campaigner from the Friends of Eden, Lakeland and Lunesdale Scenery group in the Lake District, said: "Every wind farm application says it will lead to a big saving in the amount of carbon dioxide produced. This has been greatly exaggerated and the reduction in the carbon displacement figure is a significant admission of this.
"As we get cleaner power stations on line, the figure will get even lower. It further backs the argument that wind farms are one of the most inefficient and expensive ways of lowering carbon emissions."
Because wind farms burn no fuel, they emit no carbon dioxide during regular running. The revised calculation for the amount of carbon emission they save has come about because the BWEA's earlier figure did not take account of recent improvements to the technology used in conventional, fossil-fuel-burning power stations.
The figure of 860 grams dates back to the days of old-style coal-fired power stations. However, since the early 1990s, many of the dirty coal-fired stations have been replaced by cleaner-burning stations, with a consequent reduction in what the industry calls the "grid average mix" figure for carbon dioxide displacement.
As a result, a modern 100MW coal or gas power station is now calculated to produce half as many tonnes of carbon dioxide as its predecessor would have done.
The BWEA's move follows a number of rulings by the ASA against claims made by individual wind farm promoters about the benefits their schemes would have in reducing carbon emissions.
In one key adjudication, the ASA ruled that a claim by Npower Renewables that a wind farm planned for the southern edge of Exmoor National Park, in Devon, would help prevent the release of 33,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere was "inaccurate and likely to mislead". This claim was based on the 860-gram figure.
The watchdog concluded: "We told Npower to ensure that future carbon savings claims were based on a more representative and rigorous carbon emissions factor."
The ASA has now recommended that the BWEA and generating companies use the far lower figure of 430 grams.
In a letter to its members, the BWEA's head of onshore, Jan Matthiesen, said: "It was agreed to recommend to all BWEA members to use the single static figure of 430 g CO2/kWh for the time being. The advantage is that it is well accepted and presents little risk as it understates the true figure."
This is now the figure given on the BWEA's website. The organisation will also be forced to lower its claim for the total amount of carbon dioxide emission saved by the 2,389 wind turbines currently operating around Britain.
But the association denied the change weakened the case for wind farms.
Nick Medic, spokesman for the BWEA, said: "Wind farms are still eliminating emissions. The fact is that fossil fuel burning power stations belch out CO2 and wind farms don't. That has not changed.
"The fact is we need to reduce carbon emissions, however you account for them. But there are people who just don't like wind farms and will use any argument against them."

Save Our Silton
PRESS RELEASE
08 December 2008

FURTHER EVIDENCE SILTON NOT RIGHT SITE FOR TURBINES

Further evidence has come to light today regarding the inappropriateness of the site earmarked at Silton in Dorset for the development of 6 giant industrial wind turbines.

A slightly smaller 262ft wind turbine situated close to homes in King's Dyke, Whittlesey had to be switched off yesterday after its frozen blades threw off shards of ice - many crashing into nearby homes. (See below for link to video clip).

Turbine expert John Stoneman, of Cambridgeshire Environmental Wildlife Protection, is quoted as saying "The blades revolve at 200mph and those ice shards become projectiles. They would certainly kill someone if they hit (them)”.

This incident comes days after the Scottish Parliament published a planning notice (which forms a guide to developers) which recommended that wind turbine sites over 20MW should only really be considered when they are at least 2km away from the nearest villages and towns. This guidance, whilst for slightly larger developments, backs up similar recommendations from across Europe which have found real problems for communities when these distances have not been maintained.

The issues around safety and distance are not new. The maintenance manual for workers on the Vestas V90-3MW recommends that technicians “do not stay within a radius of 400m (1300ft) from the turbine unless it is necessary.” Furthermore, the same manual recommends that “children do not stay by or play nearby the turbine.”

Yet, the site chosen by the developers at Silton is only 550m from the nearest dwelling, and right next to a public highway.
Save Our Silton, Chairman, Chris Langham said, “These elements and incidents even taken on their own would each be enough to show that the site chosen is inappropriate. Taken together they should make any planner recommend against permission for development”
END
For further information please call 07968 049 832

Notes for Editors
1) Save Our Silton now has close to 500 local, individual and family members.

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SAVE OUR SILTON


Minutes of The Annual General Meeting of the Association held at Milton on Stour School on Friday 5 December 2008 at 7 p.m.


Present:

Chairman: Chris Langham

Committee members:

Tim Allard
Ian Barter
David Smith
Brian Trueman
Dee Worlock

31 (thirty one) members of the Association


1. Chairman’s report The Chairman welcomed members present and presented his report on the activities of the Association during 2008

2. Accounts The Treasurer presented (a) the Audited Accounts of the Association for the period ending 30 November 2008 together with the Auditor’s report on the Accounts, and (b) his report as to the financial position of the Association, both of which were unanimously approved.

3. Appointment of Auditor Agreed: unanimously to approve the Treasurer’s recommendation that David Jordan be reappointed Auditor of the Association for the forthcoming year.

4. Election of Officers Agreed: unanimously to re-elect Chris Langham (Chairman), Ian Barter (Secretary) and Brian Trueman (Treasurer) officers of the Association and members of the Committee.

5. Election of Committee

Agreed: unanimously to re-elect Tim Allard, Neil Morrison, David Smith and Dee Worlock members of the Committee.

Signed: I Barter, Secretary.

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(4th December): Click here to view the video clip from BBC news - absolutely terrifying! And remember, the Silton turbines, if built, would be within 50m of the Drove Road - a public highway - and less than 150m from the B3081!

How on earth did the developer get permission to erect the turbine so close to houses ? Noise & ice pollution!

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