May 18, 2011
England, Letters

The fact is wind farms are totally inefficient

Scunthorpe Telegraph, www.thisisscunthorpe.co.uk 18 May 2011

And so it continues. The relentless creation of wind farms, blighting our beautiful land and seascapes.

I was pleased, briefly, to read that the Committee On Climate Change has called on the Government to scale back plans to build thousands of turbines off the coast of Britain.

But my pleasure was short-lived as they instead want more built onshore.

To sugar coat the increasingly bitter pill, announcements of such developments are sold to us as creating jobs.

Heaven knows jobs are in short supply, particularly since our manufacturing industry largely vanished.

But building wind turbines is not the answer, either to employment or energy problems.

There is certainly money to be made but that’s by the developers, often foreign companies, who receive huge subsidies to ensure the ridiculous EU CO2 targets are met.

The fact of the matter is wind farms are totally inefficient.

Recent research by the John Muir Trust concluded they often only work at 10 per cent of their capacity because of a lack of wind.

And more and more people realise this, after all you can’t fool all the people all of the time.

Let me give you a couple of examples of the inefficiencies.

All of Scotland’s wind farms, running at 24 per cent capacity for their full 20-year lifetime, would forestall 0.00002 Celsius of global warming.

That’s 1/50,000 of a degree, or 1/2500 of the threshold below which even the most modern instruments and methods are unable to detect a change in global temperature, at a cost of tens of billions.

And the Thanet Wind Array, the largest offshore wind farm in Europe, is receiving £1.2 billion in subsidy – it will forestall negligible global warming.

The irrefutable problem is that wind is unpredictable. The windmills don’t work during heat waves or freezing temperatures and when it gets too windy the resulting power cannot be stored.

Wind turbines are a blight aesthetically and economically. Up to seven per cent of our energy bills is now going to subsidise what will be regarded by future generations as the madness of our age.

Godfrey Bloom

UKIP MEP for Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire

URL to article:  https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2011/05/18/the-fact-is-wind-farms-are-totally-inefficient/