Are they Green?
Broadview Energy, who plan to erect four wind turbines between Gilmorton, Ashby Magna and Dunton Bassett, would have you believe that they most definitely are “green”.
As would the Government and Friends of the Earth.
However, and it’s a pretty big however, they are
not as green as they would have you believe. OK, they produce electricity when the wind blows without harmful emissions, but this isn’t the whole story. Let’s examine some facts.
The goal of our renewable energy policy is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel power stations. But despite there being tens of thousands of wind turbines around the world today (one company, Vestas, has built 35,000),
not a single power station has shut as a consequence. Don’t take our word for it, here’s Broadview’s statement on the subject:
“No specific power station will be decommissioned as a result of our wind farm”
The reason for this is that the wind, like the British weather, is totally unpredictable. Which means that when the wind stops blowing, we need a normal power station to stop the lights going out, keep our fridges running and the life support machines in hospitals working.
Now, you can’t just turn a power station on and off like a light bulb – you have to keep them “idling” when they’re not needed. Guess what they produce when they idle? Yep,
lots of CO2. So whilst the wind turbines themselves don’t produce CO2, the backup power they force us to keep does. To quote one commentator this is
“at best, an oversight; at worst grand hypocrisy – the big industry equivalent of cycling to work whilst a car journeys behind, carrying one’s bags”
Also, when the wind blows during periods when we don’t need electricity, we’ll have to throw it away (Denmark
sells at a loss half of the electricity generated by its huge wind farms).
It gets worse. The German government’s Energy Agency (Germany has more wind turbines than anywhere else in the world) announced in 2005 that money would be better spent targeting energy efficiency to combat greenhouse gases. At a
fraction of the cost of building wind farms, installing modern filters at fossil fuel power stations would lead to significant reductions in CO2 emissions……..
No doubt you’re wondering why anybody is bothering with wind power. Well, our Government is desperate to pander to our European neighbours and have agreed to obtain 10% of our energy from renewable sources by 2010. So they’ve made incredibly attractive subsidies available to developers building wind farms and in their panic to meet this target, the Government is choosing easy options. It is
blind to the lessons of other countries that have experimented on a large scale with wind and abandoned it as wind farms will neither deliver significant CO2 savings, nor result in a viable source of energy. They just want to tick another European box.
Some more numbers for you. According to the Renewable Energy Foundation the total impact of the Governments wind policy will be to reduce global CO2 emissions by 0.0004 i.e. 4 ten thousandths. Now, the US Department of Energy has calculated that the total
MAN MADE CO2 is about 4% of the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. So, if the government gets its way and ruins our country side for their European buddies, they will make 0.0016 % difference to the amount of atmospheric CO2. This is clearly a huge waste of time as it will have
no discernible impact on anthropogenic global warming.
Here’s another interesting number. Broadview stand to make a whopping £350,000 per turbine per year in these subsidies. Just in case you’re wondering, you, the consumer has to pay this through your electricity bill, meaning that your bills are likely to be another 10-15% higher. Let’s do some maths – five turbines times 29 years (the length of time they’ve leased the land for) equates to £50 million. Oh, and they may decide to build ten – presumably so their chief executive can afford a better private jet?