Monday, September 19, 2011

The enduring farce of “wind power”

Wind farm paid £1.2 million to produce no electricity
A wind farm has been paid £1.2 million not to produce electricity for eight-and-a-half hours.
Edward Malnick and Robert Mendick
The amount is ten times greater than the wind farm’s owners would have received had they actually generated any electricity.
The disclosure exposes the bizarre workings of Britain’s electricity supply, prompting calls last night for an official investigation into the payments system. (TDT)
Wind power: a policy spinning out of control
Telegraph View: The Government’s policy on renewable energy is based on dogma not evidence.
The Coalition is committed to a policy, mandated by the EU, of ensuring that 40 per cent of Britain’s electricity comes from renewable sources by 2020. The renewable source that has been chosen to provide most of the electricity is wind. As our columnist Christopher Booker has pointed out, this creates a serious problem: wind does not blow at a constant rate, which makes it unreliable as an energy supply. There is no way to store the surplus electricity produced when there is too much wind; and when there is no wind, there is no electricity from wind turbines.
The full folly of these turbines is revealed in our report today. Because the electricity it produces cannot be stored, one wind farm has been paid more than £1 million simply to ensure that it does not produce electricity for eight hours. The company profiting from this lunatic process is not British, but foreign – in common with most of those firms operating wind farms in this country. That would not be of any concern were these companies actually adding to our prosperity, but they are not: they are destroying value rather than creating it, a process only made possible because the Government takes our money and gives it to them. In return, taxpayers face higher electricity bills and an economy that is damaged because its costs have been artificially inflated by the decision to use wind as a principal source of power. It is a ludicrous situation. (TDT)

No comments: