The [UK] Government pays an indirect subsidy, a “renewable obligation”, or RO – and putting up a wind turbine is the cheapest way to collect it. In contrast to better renewable technologies, a turbine is inexpensive to build, perhaps around £2 million, and it lasts at least 20 years.This is me, looking shocked. Like those German solar power plants where they lit them up with floodlights at night because the subsidized "solar" rates were so much higher than fossil fuel rates. Also in the article:The total RO paid to the wind industry last year was £400 million. So each of Britain’s wind turbines earned, on average, £138,000 in subsidy last year – more than Mrs Clegg’s husband makes. Add in the profits from selling the electricity they generate and after construction costs are cleared, you will be making nearly £300,000 per year per turbine, half of it courtesy of the Government.
Welcome to "Green" power: intermittent, unreliable, and so insanely subsidized that you run conventional generators to make up for them. Higher cost, higher pollution, higher unreliability. But at least it lets Lefties feel better about themselves while they screw poor people and rape Mother Gaia.But Professor David MacKay, who is now chief scientific adviser at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, has pointed out that in autumn/winter 2006/7 there were 17 days when output from Britain’s wind turbines was less than 10 per cent of their total capacity. On five of those days, output was below 5 per cent and on one day it was only 2 per cent. And those were the windier seasons.
To cope with what’s called “intermittency”, you must do two things.
First, you have to build far more wind turbines, in far more places, than you theoretically need. Prof MacKay says: “We need to be imagining industrialising really large tranches of the countryside.” Every view, from every summit in Britain – apart, perhaps, from a handful of specially preserved recreational mountains – will be like the view from Plynlimon.
...The second thing you have to do is build more conventional, carbon-emitting power stations. Unlike wind farms, these can provide electricity predictably and more or less on demand.
Forget Carbon Credits; the UK.Gov needs to buy Smug Credits.
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6 comments:
On that note you might enjoy grumpydispatcher.blogspot.com. He writes alternately as an energy dispatcher and as a firefighter.
Jim
Ya know, last year, I was driving along I-10 in Texas, and noticed windmills built as far as the eye could see, and guess what? Not a single one of them was turning. And they were everywhere.
Sigh.
Ain't green great?
Power generating windmills have become the predominant crop in this part of southwest Iowa - they seem to be popping up all over the place.
I've wondered, as I've followed the various parts of a windmill being hauled down the Interstate on 3 or 4 tractor-trailer rigs, escorted by two pilot cars EACH, how long it takes each windmill to generate enough electricity to offset all of the hydrocarbons burnt to manufacture, transport, assemble and add it to the grid.
Perhaps they're magically self-offsetting, like the electric cars that have to be recharged from an electrical grid powered primarily by coal- and natural gas-fired generating plants.
If they were really efficient and profitable, then the .gov wouldn't need to subsidize them. Like Mass Transit, it's something that appeals to liberals, but which ultimately costs way more than the benefit derived from it.
I've had some good work investigating the big peat slides that windfarm construction has set off here in Ireland.
It must be pretty disconcerting when half the hillside starts to move and turn to slurry - right beside you.
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