Okay now...imagine 7,000 huge wind turbines stretching the entire coastline of England, Wales and Scotland (one every half-mile). That's the key element in the British government's plan to reduce the "energy poverty" of its citizenry, a plan that promises to create enough power for all 25 million households by 2020.That's an aesthetic nightmare, of course, not to mention the slaughter of birds, but the politicians insist it is necessary to cope with the global warming crisis. But just as the global warming "crisis" is itself based on skimpy and shifting scientific data, so is this radical solution based on bad science...and bad economics too.
...Wind power sounds a great European success story -- one to be echoed in the US, it seems, as 2008 is set to see wind power developments shatter records for the fourth consecutive year. However, a closer look at the European "success" story reveals that all is not quite as it seems. Wind seems to be blowing in the mind of the politically correct and those on the recent environmentalist bandwagon but the cost is going to be huge, no companies will plunge into it without massive government subsidies and, if actually built, power reliability will take a nosedive...
That paragraph comes from a pressing report written by Peter Glover and Michael Economides for TCS Daily. They continue:
...But even wind industry supporters spotted the real flaw in the British plan. Gordon Edge, the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) Director of Economics and Markets, called the government's plan "piece in the sky." Edge recognized that private capital investment will not be forthcoming. Dan Lewis of the Economic Research Council added that the British Government was "deluding itself on a grand scale. There will be no race by investors to build offshore wind farms." These voices recognize that, to date, the taxpayer alone has picked up the wind power tab.
Despite public subsidies to the UK wind industry of over $500 million the government has so far only seen that such a massive investment provided less than half of one percent of the UK's electricity needs. In August 2007, the BBC's Radio 4 Costing the Earth program reported that figures proved that government financial incentives were encouraging wind industry firms to cash-in on massive government subsidies and build wind farms on non-viable sites across the mainland. Even in Europe's windiest country, the winds are just "too variable", with most turbines consistently under-performing. Having analysed figures submitted to the UK electricity watchdog Ofgem on every farm's load factor, Engineering Consultant Jim Oswald explained to the BBC, "It's the power swings that worry us. Over a 20-hour period you can go from almost 100 percent wind output to 20 percent."The recommended "load factor" to make a wind farm economically viable and efficient is just over 30 percent. However, many of Britain's onshore farms have been running at around 20 percent, with some, in urban areas, dropping as low as 9 percent. Oswald believes that an over-reliance on wind power will result both in major power failures across the UK and an increase in electricity bills of up to 50 percent...
There's yet more to be said about this muddle-headed disaster in the making, so read the rest of the article here.
