Your front page headline on June 6, ‘Wind farm would cost us £20M’ fills me with dismay. It will cost our fishermen £20million and cost the rest of us much more.
Have our supreme government in Brussels and our provincial government in Westminster not yet appreciated that global warming stopped in 1998 and has nothing to do with CO2 emissions. Even so, we have to get away from oil and gas.
The Lyme Bay site for a huge wind farm as reported in your paper will occupy an area of prime fishing but it is only one of 11 offshore wind farm sites planned to be built around our coast, most in prime fishing areas.
The plan calls for 5,000 or more turbines with an installed capacity of 33 giga watts, which is generally reported in the media to provide a quarter of our national electricity requirement – not so – wind turbines, due to the vagaries of the wind only produce about 30 per cent of their installed capacity or a mere 10 giga watts.
The cost is estimated at between £60 and £80billion pounds and rising. Five nuclear power stations will produce the same power at a maximum cost of £14billion.
To add to our problems, our existing nuclear plants are reaching the end of their useful life and will have to be shut down soon. Nine other major power stations (six coal and three oil-fired) will not be able to meet the requirements of the EU’s Large Combustion Plants Directive and will close, leaving us with a huge power generating shortfall.
Our electricity bills are set to be enormous – someone has to pay for the generous subsidies paid to offshore wind farms and by 2015 or even earlier, the lights will start to go out.
In this age of IT, any power cut will have disastrous consequences since every computer in the area affected will shut down and the economy will collapse.
PETER WYATT
St Peter’s Quay
Totnes
16 June 2008
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2008/06/17/wind-farms-will-end-up-costing-us-more-than-money/