The 101 Tory MPs who oppose wind farms have been duped

07 Feb 2012

I shouldn’t be the one writing a response in defence of onshore wind BUT the orchestrated Telegraph piece doesn’t make much sense. Their specific objections to onshore wind turbines are that they are inefficient, intermittent and look ugly. Lets take them in turn;

‘Inefficient’ – what does this actually mean, which metric? Inefficient in comparison to what exactly? You can’t (if this is what is implied) compare the ‘efficiency’ of wind to the ‘efficiency’ of nuclear – that just doesn’t have any meaning. The only relevant comparison here is the cost of energy – and there is a lot of evidence that shows wind (and now solar) are cheaper than nuclear. We pay £120 of tax per household per year just for decommissioning (I have this in writing from DECC), far more than for wind. We also provide a number of other subsidies to nuclear (such as free insurance) that makes nuclear the more expensive option – its just the subsidies are hidden. The cost of wind and solar is falling (particularly solar – large scale solar in the UK will be back-on in 2012 on 2 ROCs) whereas the cost of nuclear continues to rise.

‘Intermittent’ is another issue that isn’t discussed in a scientifically literate way. Firstly, demand is not constant, so you need some energy sources which are intermittent to help balance supply and demand – we would have just as big a problem if we only had inflexible base load. Secondly, there is a huge amount of progress being made in distribution, smart grid and storage technologies which point to intermittency not being a problem in future. There have been a number of articles criticising wind energy because farms are being asked to turn off supply. The fact is that the failing here is on the part of the utilities and National Grid for not making the necessary improvements to their systems to be able to accommodate this electricity. There is no shortage of demand for wind energy, but the network operators are failing to get the energy to where it is needed and prefer to lobby against wind instead.

‘Wind farms look ugly’ This is obviously subjective and is actually a big advantage for solar in the wind vs solar debate since solar is much less visibly apparent. My personal view is that given the environmental threat from global warming (which has as much scientific consensus as the link between tobacco and cancer) how can one possibly prioritise aesthetics over the habitability of the planet?

Anonymously funded lobbying organisations are winning the battle by obscuring the relative costs of the various technologies and pandering to scepticism for new technology. They are using tactics very similar to those used by the tobacco industry – which meant it took over 20 years to convince people that there was a scientific consensus on the health implications of smoking. You now have this incredible situation where 101 MPs have signed something that doesn’t actually make any sense scientifically. How and why has this happened I don’t know, but it does seem that companies with a business model based on centralised energy generation have a lot of influence in politics and the media and its natural that they would feel threatened by distributed energy generation.

Relevant links below;

New court case against DECC over their illegal nuclear subsidy;

Utility employees working at DECC;

Relationship with nuclear industry (read the emails!);

Government spending which shows that over 2/3rds of DECC’s budget goes to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority