From the Sunday Times - March 29, 2009

Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor  

The view from the top could not be clearer: Ed Miliband, the minister for energy and climate change, said last week that opposing the onward march of wind turbines - on which the government is pinning its hopes of meeting its targets on renewable energy - should be as “socially unacceptable” as not wearing a seatbelt or failing to stop at a zebra crossing.

Hmm. Tell that to the people who believe the view over Britain’s last remaining wildernesses is about to be destroyed for ever - and for a very dubious set of returns. Will wind farms turn out to be a truly revolutionary source of energy for the future or an expensive folly?

Whatever the final answer, there’s no doubt about the expense. Over the past decade developers have grown rich on lavish - and, critics would say, misdirected - government subsidies. Wind farming is the new gold rush.

So far, renewable power companies have erected 2,390 wind turbines at 200 onshore sites. Another 4,800 are planned, with many more to follow. The power generated will be carried away by lines of pylons crossing Snowdonia national park and areas of outstanding natural beauty in Anglesey, Kent, Lincolnshire and Somerset. For enthusiasts such as Miliband, this destruction is the price Britain must pay.

Alas, it’s not the only price. A quick calculation shows just how lucrative wind farms can be for the lucky few: take the output of a 3-megawatt (MW) turbine, standing about 550ft high. In a good wind it can generate enough power tomeet the annual needs of about 1,600 households.

The owner of such a machine could expect to sell the 9,200MW hours of power generated in a year for about £331,000 at today’s prices. Not bad, but the real profit lies elsewhere, in the form of little bits of paper known as renewable obligation certificates (Rocs). Under a government scheme, the wind farmer is allowed to “create” one Roc for each megawatt hour of electricity generated - and to charge the consumer for doing so.

Currently each Roc is worth £48, so our 3MW turbine is generating an additional £441,600 each year, simply from the sale of Rocs. Add this all together and that one machine will earn £772,600 a year, or just under £20m over a typical 25-year lifetime - assuming the subsidies continue at the same rate. And it will have cost only around £3m£4m to build.

In Britain while the government has thrown money at renewable energy generators, it seems not to have anticipated the huge additional costs that wind brings with it.

The problem is this: wind does not blow all the time, so if Britain is to keep the lights on when the breeze slackens, wind power needs support from other forms of power. This means that for every wind farm we build, there must be a coal or gas-fired power station waiting in the wings to take over.

Right now Britain has about 76 gigawatts (GW) of generating capacity, mostly nuclear, coal and gas. The government has said it wants 30GW of our power to come from wind by 2030, but to achieve that it will also have to build or maintain an extra 30GW of back-up power stations. So by 2030 Britain will have to sustain power stations capable of generating 100GW of electricity to provide the power we now get from 76GW.

Then there are the new European Union regulations, which stipulate that Britain must get 15% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. To meet this target overall will mean producing some 30% of our electricity from renewables - and wind is the only mature technology able to deliver it.

Dieter Helm, professor of energy policy at Oxford University, believes this is too ambitious. “We could build and install the thousands of turbines and back-up power stations needed, but only at great cost,” he says. “It is bound to fail but no one dares talk about that - or not yet.”

The other thing government does not like to talk about is the cost to consumers. At the moment, subsidising wind turbines adds £12 to the typical annual domestic power bill of £474. This is small now but will surge as more turbines are built.

Will it be worth it? The renewables obligation, by the way, is just one of the charges for dealing with climate change already being added to our energy bills. The average power and gas consumer is already paying an annual extra £31 for carbon permits, under the EU emissions trading scheme, and another £38 for the UK government’s carbon emission reductions programme, which subsidises home energy efficiency programmes.

Many wonder if such mounting charges are politically sustainable. A couple of years ago Ofgem, the energy regulator, warned the government that the renewables obligation system was handing wind farm operators windfall profits that could provoke a consumer backlash - perhaps one as angry as the fuel tax protests of 2000. What price then for Miliband’s bleats about the “social unacceptability” of opposing wind power?

The total power generated by all the 2,300 turbines so far built in Britain, is less than that contributed by a single medium-size conventional power station.

By Christopher Booker

Sunday Telegraph, 14 September 2008

I long had no particular views on wind farms one way or the other. But six years ago, when I first seriously looked at what they actually contribute to our energy needs and our environment, I had a profound shock. It was clear that the craze for wind energy had become one of the greatest self-deceptions of our time.

Far from being “free”, wind is one of the most expensive ways of generating electricity yet devised. Without an almost 100 per cent subsidy, unwittingly paid by all of us through our electricity bills, no one would dream of building giant wind turbines in Britain, because their cost is not remotely competitive.

Turbines are hopelessly ineffectual. The amount of electricity they deliver is derisory. The total power generated by all the 2,300 turbines so far built in Britain — covering hundreds of square miles of countryside and sea — averages just over 600 megawatts in a year, less than that contributed by a single medium-size conventional power station.

Most serious of all, however, is the fact that wind energy is hopelessly unreliable, for the simple reason that wind speeds are not only constantly changing but wholly unpredictable. One minute a turbine may be whizzing round, generating at full capacity; the next the wind drops and the turbine is contributing only a fraction of its capacity or nothing at all.

To keep electricity supplies going, the grid must have permanently available alternative conventional power sources equivalent to the maximum capacity of the wind turbines, ready to step in when the wind stops. This in itself is hugely inefficient, adding greatly to costs and, as they have discovered on the Continent, threatening to destabilise the grid or bring it to a halt when wind speeds change dramatically.

The best-kept secret of the wind industry, however, which continues to fool both politicians and the media, is its trick of referring only to the contribution of windmills in terms of their “installed capacity”, as if that is what they will actually deliver. They talk about a “16 megawatt” wind farm “powering x thousand homes” as if that is the contribution it will make to our electricity needs. Yet in reality, thanks to the intermittency of the wind, a turbine will on average produce through the year only a quarter of its capacity.

The success of this deception means that politicians almost invariably exaggerate the potential benefits of wind power by a factor of four. And of course the other great trick is to conceal the fact that all this must be paid for by that huge hidden subsidy.

The real danger of the “great wind scam” is that it takes the eyes of politicians off the real energy crisis fast approaching us, so that we are not building the proper power stations we need to keep our lights on. That is why it will one day be looked back on as having been one of the most incomprehensible blunders of our age.

The reasons for building wind farms anywhere are a) to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and b) to reduce our dependence on imported hydrocarbon fuels.

Avoidance of carbon dioxide emissions.

The amount of CO₂ saved by wind generated power depends on assumptions about the mix of fuels wind replaces. The DTI uses a figure of 0.43 tonne of CO₂/MWh. For a 1MW generator with a load factor of 30%, (a generous figure for this part of England) the number of megawatt hours produced per year would be 0.3 x 365 x 24 = 2,628 MWh/year.

Thus the annual CO₂ saving for each MW of installed wind generation would be 2,628 x 0.43 = 1130 tonnes/year. Total emissions from the UK from the burning of fossil fuels are calculated at 587 million tonnes CO₂/year, representing 2.2% of global output (United Nations for year 2004).

Latest government figures state that our average electricity demand is around 46 gigawatts or 46,000 MW. If wind replaces 10% of this by 2010, it will need to replace 4,600 MW. This would save 4600 x 1130 = 5,198,000 tonnes of CO₂ or about 0.9% of UK emissions.

To generate 4600 MW would require 2300 two megawatt turbines constantly running at full load, or 7667 turbines running at 30% load factor. The turbines proposed for Harrington are to be 126 meters to the blade tips and a “wingspan” of 80 meters and therefore have to be spaced considerable distances apart. I believe this is true for most of the other 19 proposals for wind farms within about 10 miles of the Harrington site, because of the low wind speeds in this part of the country. When you consider the amount of land required for the number of turbines required it becomes obvious that the whole notion of electricity generation from the wind, at least in central England is unsustainable. The visual impact on our green and pleasant land would be awful!

It is interesting to read the comments of the recent chairman of the board of Nuon

While the mechanisms of a single European market are well understood and widely adopted in the agricultural sector, policymakers find it difficult to apply the same concept of making optimal use of each country’s natural resources when it comes to fuel mixes. Europe is still dragging its feet on adopting a single energy market for renewables, in which wind energy would be developed where it makes sense instead of seeing wind farms receiving substantial national subsidies in countries where they run for barely a fifth of the year.   Ludo van Halderen in 2008.

Nonetheless if government forces this policy through, the House of Lords Economic Affairs committee estimates “the cost of electricity generation and transmission would increase by £6.8 billion, or 38%. This translates into an £80 annual fuel bill increase for the average household.” (Report published 25^th November 2008)

All the above would be necessary to achieve just 0.9% saving in UK output of carbon dioxide. The effect on the planet would be zero.

Reduction of imported hydrocarbon fuels.

Because of the intermittent nature of wind generation, it is unlikely that, in this country we will be able to shut down any existing thermal generators beyond those we have to for exceeding their design life. In fact because of an impending major short fall in generating capacity, we will have to build more thermal stations as fast as possible, and possibly keep open some older coal fired stations beyond what the EU would have us do.

Because our island grid must be constantly balanced between generation and use entirely from within UK generator capacity, (apart from a small capacity interconnector with France) and because wind power is unreliable, thermal stations must always be available at short notice as back up. The new thermal stations are likely to be gas fired turbine units because these are relatively quick to build, and emit less CO2 than oil or coal and can be brought up from “spinning reserve” to full power relatively quickly. These will of course increasingly use imported gas. Furthermore if you replace these with wind farms, the gain in CO2 reduction will be even less.

All this will mean virtually no saving in imported fuel. There may be no perfect generation technology available right now. However building nuclear stations would offer the reliable despatchable power our country needs and with virtually no emissions, and reduce imported fuels. This ticks all the boxes. So why build turbines as well?

Sceptical by Degrees

by Dave Unwin (Chair, SayNoToHarringtonWindFarm group)

The Issue

The major justification for the state-driven push towards renewable energy sources such as wind has been the notion of climate change caused by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels such as coal and oil since the industrial revolution.  Computer models of the atmosphere suggest that increasing carbon dioxide will lead, by way of enhancement of the natural greenhouse effect of the atmosphere, to a warmer planet and there is decent observational evidence of warming in two phases during the twentieth century so at first sight it seems that the idea can be confirmed. The shorthand name global warming has been coined as a catch-all phrase to describe it.

Global warming has been enthusiastically taken up by some atmospheric scientists, most ‘greens’, and many politicians, with any dissent rigorously sought out and often subject to ridicule by people like the chairs of the supposedly unbiased Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), environmentalists, and politicians such as Al Gore in his Inconvenient Truth movie.  More seriously for the countryside of UK, the same hypothesis is being used by company after company anxious to access the massive and unbalanced government subsidies that are on offer to the wind energy industry.  Let there be no doubt about it, if even a small proportion of these schemes go through, the windmills they build will scar the landscape for many, many years to come and, as I hope to show, all on the back of a long chain of suppositions and assumptions that are hard to sustain.

Who’s talking?

Let me say where I am coming from.  Unlike many of those mentioned above, I do not claim special expertise in the specific science of global warming and, until I found it being used to justify over a hundred windmills in a very small area of England close to my home, I tried hard to stay out of any public debate.  My degrees are in Geography, but I taught Meteorology and Climatology at degree level for almost forty years, from 1967 onwards.  On the way in 1965 I was winner of the University of London’s Dora Belasco Medal for Meteorology and Climatology, became a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and even a founder committee member of what is now their specialist climatology research group (originally the Association of British Climatologists).  In those days,  climatology was distinctly unfashionable in our universities, but that was before big science moved in on the back of the global warming hypothesis.  What I have done is to publish a bit in a related field, on observational and modelling studies of how cities modify their outdoor climate.  I’ve also taught a module on climate change for many years and am reasonably familiar, not only with the contemporary literature, but also with a lot of the scientific literature that has led to it.  In short, I’ve been around academically for a fair length of time, from when climatology was the preserve of scholars such as Gordon Manley and Hubert Lamb and even the reality of short period climate change was questioned, to today’s hi-tech approaches in which computer models and satellite remote sensing are the main investigative tools.

Everything in this experience makes me a greenhouse sceptic.  Having ‘come out’ in this way, it’s important to point out that I have never benefited either academically or financially from being sceptical.  Some years ago, the Guardian published a three-line letter from me in which I noted that people like me, climate scientists sceptical about the global warming hypothesis (let’s call this GWH), are not as many environmentalists assert, both mad and bad, and there are perfectly reasonable arguments for taking a sceptical view.  To my amazement this led to my being blacklisted on a ‘green’ website (http://risingtide.org.uk/hallofshame) as a scientist who has ‘done well’ out of being sceptical. That the great cosmologist Fred Hoyle is on the same list is no comfort, quite flattering in fact, but these well-meaning greens are simply wrong.  The reverse is almost certainly the case:  the GWH lobby has done far better out of it than the sceptics and anyhow the supposed scientific consensus is nowhere near as solid as GWH supporters try to fool you into thinking.  Demonizing sceptics shouldn’t belong to science, nor should attempts to censure alternative views as in the utterly disgraceful attempt by two senior members of the warming lobby over the unfortunately named, but entirely justifiable, Channel 4 programme on the Great Global Warming Swindle.

The point I want to make is that there are degrees of scepticism and the entire global warming hypothesis rests on a series of contestable assumptions that are only seldom spelled out.  Let’s work our way through a series of increasingly difficult-to-accept-propositions, starting with:

Proposition 1: Climate changes  

Since the 18th century we have known that the global climate system has experienced huge shifts notably rapidly during the last 2m years or so in the great ice ages.  I doubt that anyone, sceptic or no, is a ‘climate change denier’ when we talk of geological time.  That said, the GWH lobby likes to label any scepticism as being of this nature and the choice of the term ‘denier’, with its Holocaust overtones, is simply an insult.

Proposition 2: Climate changes over ‘historical’ timescales

It gets a little harder now!  What do we mean by ‘historical’ and for that matter ‘climate’ as well?  The notion of a climate as ‘the sequence of weather we have learned to expect’ carries with it two bits of baggage.  The first is that a time scale is implicit whenever we use the idea of probabilities of occurrence of anything in the natural world.  The second is that climate is a construction made by human beings. All the atmosphere knows about is the ‘weather’.  In this sense it’s very easy to change a climate: change your definition of the ‘climate’, usually altering the time period of interest!  This sounds ‘academic’, but in some sense it is what the GWH has done in its attempts to persuade us that climate is changing, they have shortened the timescale and so increased the chance of showing a change.

If we look over the past five hundred years or so, then it’s clear that there have been changes in the climate that have forced adaptation by human societies on quite massive scales.  In all this it’s easy to forget that until the last forty years or so our own Meteorological Office itself wasn’t too keen on the notion of significant climate change over the timescale of a human lifetime.  It is also easy to forget that the scholarship of people like Hubert Lamb and Gordon Manley in establishing the reality of significant  historical climate change was until recently thought to be an esoteric and not very ‘scientific’ backwater in climate research.  I count myself fortunate to have known both and have been taught by one of them.

Proposition 3: Climate changes over historical timescales and there is an unusual recent global warming

Things get harder still when we bring in ideas of things being ‘unusual’.  The observational evidence of the recent global warming is often much more equivocal than the GWH scientists, greens, and the media like to suggest and the current warming phase isn’t as unusual as the warmers like to pretend.  We could have a long debate on this, but one example will suffice. Loss of ice from the Greenland Icecap is often cited as evidence of global warming, but this is based almost entirely on the accessible parts of the south east where the ‘ice fiord’ (Jacobshavn) pumps icebergs into the Davis Strait and the outlet glacier is surging and down-wasting. The careful work by other scientists that suggests that as a whole the Greenland ice cap has a total mass balance that, if it is changing at all, is changing within the limits of experimental error.  From time to time its outlet glaciers ‘surge’, and have done so for millennia.  The real problem here is that, computer climate models aside, climatology is an observational science, and like geology it is subject to what I call the tyranny of the ruling theory.  What happens is that a theory is elevated to the status of truth and all observations are subsequently made with this truth in mind.   Environmental science has fooled itself before in this way, notable over the reality or otherwise of ‘continental drift’ or the total nonsense that was called denudation chronology based on an utterly wrong model of how landscapes evolve.  Lest practitioners of the Queen of the sciences (Physics) get smart here, there are numerous examples in their discipline that could be cited, most obviously the great Lord Kelvin’s famous, arrogant, and utterly wrong, assertion about the age of our planet.

Proposition 4: Climate changes over historical timescales, there is an unusual recent global warming, and that it is carbon dioxide driven

This is one step further down the chain and it gets harder still.  What is the proof?  Almost every bit of evidence cited by GWH is equivocal, subject to a different interpretation.  Examples, in no special order include:

• Al Gore’s temperature and carbon dioxide curves and the infamous ‘hockey stick’. First the curves don’t match during the period of the supposed human induced warming, failing to show the 1940s cooling and being generally out of step. Second, the Medieval warm period has been airbrushed out of the record by a devious use of base period. Anyhow, as many of the GWH would argue were it some other pair of curves, correlation like this in time can’t logically prove causation;
• The computer models. These models almost all show that if you add carbon dioxide you increase temperature to balance the planet’s energy budget. It’s important to see how these work and how they are fine-tuned. As Mandy Rice Davis said in a different context ‘They would wouldn’t they?’. Unfortunately, criticizing the models is difficult without doing a PhD or two in atmospheric physics along the way, but suffice it to say that their results aren’t as solidly based as you are often led to believe. That IPCC and the GWH industry choose to rely on the model outputs rather than observation says as much about pecking orders in the British scientific establishment as it does about climate change;
• The direction of the link. On the longer timescale of the last glacial-interglacial cycle, there is evidence of a link between carbon dioxide in the air and global temperature, well illustrated by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth. However, every time I look at these plots and analyze the data on which they are based, the conclusion I draw is that temperature leads carbon dioxide, not as is often asserted by the GWH lobby. If there is causation, it is the other way round, temperature drives carbon dioxide and the mechanism might well involve out-gassing from the oceans as the solubility of the gas changes. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t a problem, but it may mean that there are long-memory oceanographic changes that aren’t anywhere in the models for the perfectly respectable reason that by and large we don’t understand them.

Proposition 4: Climate changes over historical timescales, there is an unusual recent global warming, that is carbon dioxide driven, and the source of the extra carbon dioxide is human activity

We are getting into very difficult territory now, largely because until recently the global carbon cycle and budget hasn’t been too well understood.  What is important to realize is that the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide is a small fraction of that locked elsewhere in the planet.  Quite small changes in these non-atmospheric reservoirs could generate huge percentage changes in the atmospheric content and in a geological perspective almost certainly has.  In the true spirit of science I admit that my knowledge of carbon cycling isn’t good enough to have a view on this.

Proposition 5: Climate changes over historical timescales, there is an unusual recent global warming that is carbon dioxide driven, the source of the extra carbon dioxide is human activity, and the warming will be bad for mankind

It is one thing to produce a computer model of a huge and complex system like the global atmosphere, add some carbon dioxide and watch what happens.  It is quite another to factor into this both the detail of the regional pictures and the effects of any changes on human activity.  We are now in realms of social science that are much less certain.  This has been attempted by IPCC and is often used to justify their use of the complex atmospheric models that predict where the warming will be seen as well as how much.  Suffice it to note that under a warmed world it looks as though there will be both winners and losers and it’s very hard to predict who will be in each category.  From a UK perspective chances are we’d be OK, but this is no reason to sit on the sidelines and wait.

Proposition 6: Climate changes over historical timescales, there is an unusual recent global warming that is carbon dioxide driven, the source of the extra is from human activity, the warming will be bad for mankind, and we can only put this right if we massively reduce the output of carbon into the atmosphere

Let’s call this the IPCC/Kyoto notion.  We have reached it by way of several degrees of scepticism, but we can be just as sceptical about this proposition. Let’s call it the Lomberg/Lawson position in acknowledgement of two economists trying to handle the implications of the entire edifice.  First, as events and the data have shown since Kyoto, the strategy is totally unworkable.  Second, it may well not even be the best way to tackle the problem. In the 1960s there was a fashion amongst climatologists for studying what were called climatic hazards.  Most turned out to be analyses of the economic impacts and mitigation strategies for hazards such as drought, flood, hurricanes, tornados, and snowstorms.  Without exception they showed that the sensible coping strategy isn’t to try to change the physics of the causal processes, yet this is precisely what Kyoto is suggesting for global warming, which might be the ultimate climatic hazard. Instead they suggested various coping strategies such as adaptation and adjustment.  I note with interest that the great James Lovelock has recently come out strongly in similar vein over the global warming hazard.

Proposition 7: Climate changes over historical timescales, there is an unusual recent global warming that is carbon dioxide driven, the source of the extra is from human activity, the warming will be bad for mankind, we can only put this right if we massively reduce the output of carbon into the atmosphere and if we don’t we’ll trigger a ‘runaway greenhouse’ that bakes the planet.

This is the final GWH nightmare.  They could be right, but if they are it’s probably too late!  ‘Que sera’ as Doris Day used to sing.  It’s comforting to note that not too many climate scientists actually hold this position, and this includes several of the better known global warmers.

All of this is not to deny the sense in reducing dependence on fossil fuels.  But there is a far better set of arguments about this that ought to be deployed.  If we forgot about ‘global warming’, and looked rationally at energy supply problems, I doubt that a ludicrously expensive, landscape disfiguring, and physically inconvenient power source such as onshore wind farming would figure in our calculations.

And, in case you doubt it, I like to think that in holding this view and in my general lifestyle I am reasonably ‘green’.

David Unwin

The European Platform Against Windfarms, « EPAW » was founded in Paris on October 4th, 2008. It was formed at the initiative of French, German, Spanish and Belgian associations, joined more recently by other associations based in the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, and other countries whose numbers keep increasing. The Platform also receives support from all over the world.
The aim of this platform is to defend the interests of the numerous groups that are either fighting individual windfarm projects, or denouncing the ineffectiveness of windfarms for solving the problems of man and the planet, or fighting generally against their deleterious effects as regards people and their health, wildlife, landscapes, tourism, property values, quality of life, water contamination and other ill effects on the environment.

To this end, EPAW is sending a letter to the European institutions demanding that a moratorium be declared on the approbation of new windfarm projects and the construction of approved ones.  The letter will also be released to the European media.  EPAW wants to make the European institutions aware that hundreds of associations, villages and other groups are totally dissatisfied with windfarms ; that intermittent, uncontrolable energy fails to solve any one of humanity’s problems, even partially ; and that the only thing wind turbines do is to cause considerable harm to people, to the economy, to national budgets, and to the environment.  The letter, which is currently in draft for consultation to members, is as follows :

EPAW is favourable to renewable energies when they are effective, and when they are socially, economically and environmentally acceptable. In order to reach that goal, it is at least imperative that their installation and development be discussed with the local populations.

EPAW deplores the fact that the deployment of some of these renewable energies takes place in the European Union under the pressure of financial or ideological lobbies with the disturbing consequence that the results don’t fulfil the fundamental demands of sustainable development.

EPAW notices that windfarms are the most worrying case, draining for decades most of the public funding dedicated to renewable energies without ever having demonstrated their usefulness. Worse, they have contributed to degrade the existing environment.

EPAW wishes to draw your attention to the fact that windfarms have shown time and again that they are in radical conflict with the European policy of sustainable development:

• The effect of windfarms on the reduction of CO2 emissions is insignificant, because of the need to resort to thermal power plants to regulate the intermittence of electricity generated by wind turbines. For the same reason, wind energy does not significantly reduce the costly, and increasingly sensitive, imports of fossil fuels;
• Windfarms make it necessary to reinforce the grid of HT power lines across Europe and to build new regulation facilities, as experience shows that grid stability is threatened by the erratic nature of wind energy. Besides their cost, the new high tension lines cause additional and unacceptable aggressions to the environment;
• Windfarms devour colossal amounts of public funds to maintain an artificial market necessary to its very existence, yet wind energy remains economically non-viable after several decades of technical progress. Moreover, the excesses of this artificial market allows scandalous personal fortunes to be built at the expense of taxpayers and consumers without any real ecological benefit, quite the contrary;
• Windfarms significantly alter Europe’s natural and cultural heritage by their deleterious effect on landscapes and historical buildings. They also have a severe impact on property values, which in the case of homeowners often represent the fruit of a lifetime of work;
• Windfarms degrade the local residents’ quality of life, even altering the health of some of them;
• Windfarms strongly imperil wildlife, and destroy natural habitats that had so far been preserved from the destructive powers of earth moving equipment, concrete, and pervasive human activity.

Confronted with the blatant contradictions existing between the sustainable development objectives of the EU and the alarming results of its present windfarm policy, EPAW solemnly requests from the European Union:

1- An immediate moratorium on all windfarm projects in the EU, including those already authorized.

2- A reality check on the results of EU windfarm policy to date by a group of credibly independent experts, particularly with regards to:

Carbon savings:

They shall evaluate the quantities of carbon dioxide emitted during the construction, maintenance, surveillance and dismantling of windfarms. They shall also assess the indirect effects of their exploitation, e.g. the quantity of CO2 emitted while regulating the intermittence of wind-generated electricity, which requires the operation of fossil fuel power plants 24h/7.

A summary shall then estimate from the above the real level of contribution of EU windfarm policy to the objectives of the Kyoto Protocol.

Economic impact:

They shall evaluate the direct and indirect costs of the deployment of windfarms, detailing its overall impact on public expenditure and, over the long term, on electricity bills for households, industries, and other consumers.

The cost analysis shall include:

- subsidies, fiscal advantages, and regulated tariffs that benefit the windfarm industry;

- the cost of building fossil-fuel power plants to balance unstable wind power, HT power lines to link the windfarms to the grid, regulating centres to manage the wind’s unpredictable variability, and the upgrading of electricity networks.

As windfarms drain considerable amounts of public funds, EPAW demands that an audit be made of the industry’s trades and practices. Shall be verified, among other things, the companies’ structures and their eventual use of fiscal havens.

Social impact:

Experts shall investigate the impact of windfarms on human health, with the participation of a representative panel of local residents.

Others shall appraise the evolution of the living environment of local residents, and assess the impact of the presence of windfarms on the value of land and buildings, as well as the tourist attractiveness over time of regions where windfarms have been deployed.

Environmental impact:

The reality check will include an inventory of natural habitats degraded by the installation of windfarms, and of landscapes sacrificed in violation of the European Landscape Convention, which stipulates: « As a reflection of European identity and diversity, the landscape is our living natural and cultural heritage, be it ordinary or outstanding, urban or rural, on land or in water. »

EPAW considers unacceptable that the European institutions would promote the ruination of the European landscape, and its uniformisation into a brown zone by thousands of windfarms stretching from Lapland to Gibraltar, some of them planted in the heart of natural reserves established at great cost by the EU’s Natura 2000 programme.

Ornithologists and biologists, explicitly recognized by EPAW for their impartiality, shall objectively evaluate the effects of windfarms and their HT power lines on wildlife and its habitat.

Finally the reality check shall look into the pollution of ground cover, topsoil, streams and rivers, as well as ground water by the construction and exploitation of windfarms, including accidents such as the spilling of lubricants by leaking or collapsed wind turbines. Other aspects to be investigated:

- the massive use of concrete for the base of wind turbines,

- the construction of access roads.

EPAW stresses the fact that the ill-conceived and poorly implemented EU windfarm policy adds oil to the fire of euroscepticism.  Informed EU public opinion have the feeling that European institutions have set their hearts on industrial wind power without taking the time to weigh its exploitation constraints and its real impact on the environment. In the vital context of building the EU’s energy base, a choice solely based on the myth of clean wind-produced electricity as promoted by the windfarm lobby is inconceivable to learned European citizens.

It would be extremely regrettable if the European Union would refuse to perform a reality check on its windfarm policy now that the negative effects of industrial wind turbines are known, affecting people, national budgets, the competitive capacity of European businesses, and the environment.

There is also a petition asking the Prime Minister to establish an automatic buffer zone of at least 2km between any industrial sized wind turbine and any home.  You can sign at:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/2000metres/

Deadline to sign up is 29 April, 2009.  Please have a look.

News Release

Tuesday 25 November 2008

LORDS ECONOMIC AFFAIRS COMMITTEE QUESTIONS DASH FOR INTERMITTENT RENEWABLE POWER GENERATION

The Government’s efforts to meet its EU 2020 renewable energy targets, even if successful, may encourage the UK to adopt an unnecessarily costly and risky approach to reducing carbon emissions, according to the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee.

In its Report The Economics of Renewable Energy, the Committee accepts that the Government has committed the UK to increasing its use of renewable energy and does not propose that they go back on that, although it is sceptical as to whether the proposed EU target for the UK, of 15% renewables by 2020, can be met. It also cautions that an over-reliance on intermittent power generation, in pursuit of the target, could prove both costly and risky.

The Committee understands that for the Government to meet its EU target, under current policies the share of electricity generated from renewable sources would need to rise from 5-6% to 30-40%. It calculates that the higher costs associated with renewable generation, in comparison to conventional or nuclear, would increase electricity generation and transmission costs by £6.8bn a year, or 38%. This translates into an £80 annual fuel bill increase for the average household.

The Committee also raises concerns about security of supply. The report points out that the scope for significant increases in the most reliable sources of renewable electricity supply - hydro-electric, domestically produced biomass and solar - is limited in the UK and that we have little experience of tidal barrages or wave. This leaves wind turbines, in particular, as the most readily available source of increases in renewable electricity. But the turbines only operate intermittently, when the wind blows, and cannot be relied upon to generate electricity when it is needed. Meeting the Government’s targets is likely to result in a dependence on intermittent renewables for electricity supply unprecedented in Europe.

Because of intermittency, a significantly greater capacity of wind based generation is needed than for conventional or nuclear generation for any given output of electricity. Furthermore, without major technological advances in electricity storage and increased interconnection between the UK and Continental grids, renewable generation will have to be backed up with conventional generating capacity to guarantee undisrupted supply. The Committee argues that wind generation should be seen largely as additional capacity, rather than a substitute for the substantial number of old coal and nuclear plants which are scheduled to be replaced by 2020.

Based on the costs and difficulties the Committee identifies in achieving rapid expansion of reliable, renewable electricity generation, the report calls on the Government to give a firm lead in maintaining a stable investment environment for alternative forms of low carbon power generation. The Committee points out that nuclear energy presents a viable, low-carbon alternative that is not intermittent and can be produced at a significantly lower cost than renewable energy; and that fossil fuel generation with carbon capture and storage, if and when it becomes available, could be another option. The report argues that it is important that:

 “Incentives to promote those renewables which offer only intermittent supply do not divert attention from, and deter investment in other low carbon generation options and thereby risk power shortages…the most reliable low-carbon alternative to renewables is nuclear power.”

The Committee goes on to consider the possibility of renewable heat providing a greater contribution to increasing the UK’s level of renewable energy usage. It points out that 2/5th of the UK’s energy usage goes on heat as opposed to only 1/5th on electricity. The Committee argues that some options for renewable heat such as biomass and heat pumps can be cheaper than renewable electricity and do not suffer the same risks of intermittency of supply. The report calls on the Government to put as least as much emphasis on encouraging the development and use of renewable heat as they do on renewable electricity generation.

Other recommendations in the report include:

• The Government should not seek to increase the use of biofuels until the costs of carbon abatement associated with its use as an alternative energy supply are reduced.
• The Government should consider establishing a substantial annual prize for the best technological contribution to producing economical renewable energy and promote research into electricity storage technologies to overcome the problems associated with intermittency.

Commenting, Lord Vallance, Chairman of the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee, said:

 ”We accept that the UK Government, along with others, must take steps to reduce carbon emissions. However we are concerned that the dash to meet the EU’s 2020 targets may draw attention and investment away from cheaper and more reliable low carbon electricity generation - such as nuclear and, potentially, fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage. Equally, the Government’s focus on renewable electricity generation should not be allowed to overshadow other, more promising roles for renewable energy, such as renewable heat.

 ”The UK is most likely to adopt wind power as its main means of producing more renewable electricity. This has an inherent weakness in that it cannot be relied upon to generate electricity at the time it is needed. Current policies would take the UK into uncharted territory, with a dependence on intermittent supply unprecedented elsewhere in Europe. To guard against power shortages, wind turbines would need to be backed up with conventional generation. Together with the requirement to replace almost a quarter of the UK’s older generating capacity by 2020, this represents a massive investment programme. Whether it is achievable in the time available is open to doubt.

“In addition, the Government should not allow its pursuit of the immediate 2020 target to take its eye off the longer term. Much more research needs to go into more effective and economical forms of renewable energy, and into electricity storage technologies which could mitigate the inherent problems associated with intermittent supply.”

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200708/ldselect/ldeconaf/195/19502.htm

As many of you will know, Nuon held a session at the Loder Hall to allow local residents to find out more about the windfarm proposal and ask questions.  Nuon representatives were friendly and co-operative and endeavoured to give honest and open answers to questions asked of them.  We did feel, however, that the level of knowledge was not consistent, and some of the information given was inaccurate.  Members of this group were, in some instances, given conflicting responses to questions.  Clearly they had a vested interest in promoting the concept of the development and so some answers were biased (proving that bias is not the unique domain of opposers of the Harrington proposal).  A member of our team visited the Nuon consultation making notes as they went.  This is the result.

What did they say?

We live in Draughton with a fantastic view over the peaceful Northamptonshire countryside; even the A14 is in a dip and hardly visible.  Mostly, the only noise we hear is the farm traffic and the pheasants.  So the windfarm would have a huge impact on my family, our community and, potentially, the value of our home.  I want to make sure that the windfarm would be built for the right reasons, in the right location and that the impact on my family and our community would be within reasonable bounds.  So I was at the Loder Hall very early on Saturday with a long list of questions!

I found the Nuon team very pleasant, helpful and reassuring.  But I did find a number of contradictions between what different members of the team told me (and, I have subsequently found out, my neighbours) on a number of points.  I also think, based on my own research and discussions with other people, that some of what was said may not be the whole story. 

In summary,:

Location

·         There would be seven turbines and one permanent anemometer mast in the locations set out in the booklet you should all have received. 

·         One member of the Nuon team told me that no more turbines would be added at a future date due to restrictions on where they can be placed.  Another member told a neighbour that although he didn’t think Nuon had plans for enlargement, there was no  guarantee, if the site was sold to another operator, that they would not seek to add further turbines.  Note that the project was considering twelve turbines initially including some on the other side of the Brampton Valley Way close to Maidwell.

·         The turbines would be only 800m (1/2 mile) from a number of homes and only 500m  (1/3mile) from one house.  The turbines are close to the bridleway and footpaths with 6 of them being only around 200m away and one much closer.  The British Horse Society recommends a distance of three times the turbine height ie 375m, but Nuon do not feel this is an issue for their proposal as the landscape is fairly open.  (Riders -  what do you think?)  Apparently, if Nuon changed the location of the turbines so they are further away from homes and public rights of way, there would only be room for a much smaller number of turbines!

·         Nuon stated that they would be protecting the Thor missile site, but are still looking into whether the turbines would encroach on the World War II site.  The turbines would be located on the old airfield but also lower down the hill.

Efficiency

·         The turbines would be 126m to the tip.  I read somewhere on the internet that they would be the highest in the UK apart from one other site.  They would also be sited on the ridges so very visible both locally and remotely in several directions. 

·         I raised concerns about whether all the turbines would be as efficient as the 29% in the brochure and was told that the lower turbines may even generate more electricity due to the direction of the prevailing wind.  I have since been told by a local meteorologist that generally a prevailing wind only comes from that direction about 30% of the time which means that for a considerable proportion of the time the wind won’t be blowing in the best direction for the lower turbines at all.  There also appears to be a discrepancy and uncertainty around the actual efficiency quoted in the brochure, by Nuon representatives, and on the website.

·         Nuon said they will be basing their planning application on publicly available wind data rather than on results of the installed anemometer as they will need 12 months of data from the mast.  When asked if they would make the data available to the local community so that we can see exactly how efficient these huge structures will be they said this data is commercially confidential.

·         I asked about safety, having read several news reports about blades crashing to the ground and being flung 400-500m in at least one instance, and two recent reports of entire turbine collapse (see http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/environment/display.var.1824703.0.0.php ).   I was told that the turbines would be safe.

Noise and flicker

·         Nuon installed five noise meters for the minimum period required by the DTI i.e. two weeks. 

·         They didn’t actually install any in Draughton village because, they say, they were unable to find any willing hosts.  They say they knocked on doors but could find no-one at home (presumably we were all at work -  convenient or am I being cynical?).  They did apparently write to one resident but say they didn’t receive a timely response (though we know the person in question replied immediately but requested data from the noise meter).  However, they told me that they could draw conclusions about Draughton from the data received at the other sites even though the landscape is different.  When I asked whether they would install meters in Draughton to address our concerns I was told that this would not be possible before the planning application was submitted.  Nuon also don’t appear to have taken weather conditions into account when measuring noise levels though they say they could obtain rainfall information from equipment at Pitsford and use wind information from central meteorological sources (this in spite of having a wind monitor on site – see above). 

·         I talked about the fact that I had read a lot about aerodynamic modulation.  Noise can be within DTI limits when measured conventionally but aerodynamic modulation is less well understood.  It is claimed by some residents at several locations to be causing health issues (sleep problems and nausea).  Nuon stated that this is at one location only (though that conflicts with articles I have read!), but conceded that more research is required into this perceived problem.  I mentioned reading that there had been a case this summer where a resident close to a windfarm had received a reduction in her council tax on the basis that the windfarm had affected the value of her home.  Nuon thought this was a one off.

·         Nuon don’t think shadow flicker will be an issue but have not yet completed the survey on whether homes potentially affected have windows pointing in a direction which may cause problems. 

Link to the national grid

·         I was left rather confused about this as I had read that there would be another planning application concerning the connection to the grid, but at the meeting received conflicting information from Graham Davey, the Project Manager, who confirmed that view, and Gavin Ward, the planning consultant, who said that it was not subject to a planning application and was a matter for National Grid at a later stage. 

·         Nuon said that there are three possible connection points: Harborough, Desborough and Kettering.  Whilst their preference would be for the connection to be underground, they could not guarantee that pylons would not be required.  Whilst there is some debate about whether turbines can look majestic, I don’t believe I have heard anyone say the same about a line of pylons, though Nuon did say that ‘smaller’ pylons would be used or that cables could be run overground using large poles.

Access, construction and local jobs

·         Nuon would be able to use the Rothwell to Lamport road to access the site without rebuilding the road, but might need to take down some road signs when long loads were being transported.  If the road needed to be closed when the turbines were delivered this would likely be done at night.  The turbines and blades would enter England via North Sea ports (probably Felixstowe) and would use the A14 to the A6 junction.

·         Although large lorries would use the B road and not drive through villages (a contractual restriction imposed by Nuon), no restrictions would be placed on contractors with smaller vehicles. 

·         The turbines would be erected by teams brought in by the turbine manufacturers (I understood they are based in, and will come from, Germany).  A neighbour asked about using local labour to maximise jobs but was told that the development company would control this and it was outside Nuon’s jurisdiction.  They were asked whether they couldn’t make this the subject of a contractual restriction too but received no comment. 

·         I was told there is a 12 month waiting list to get the turbines (compared to some newspaper reports of up to 4 years).  A neighbour had the impression that they were immediately available.

·         Construction should be completed within 12 months, “unless wind causes delay in erection of the turbines”.  Errr???!!!

Community funding

·         Nuon stated that the community would receive £50,000 per annum to fund affected villages, although another member of the team said the amount had not yet been decided.    Apparently some mention was made of Nuon trying to persuade Merton College to hand over some land as a playing field.  When asked by a neighbour if the funding was a “bribe” to get local support, this was denied. 

The Environmental Assessment is due to complete mid December, with  the planning application likely to be submitted to Daventry in January.  We would be interested to hear your views about the proposal, both for and against.  If you have any concerns you would like us to investigate or take up with Nuon, please let us know.   We’re also happy to post any other questions and responses you may have covered during the consultation session.  Email to:  saynotoharrington@gmail.com or add a comment at the end of this article.

Monday November 3^rd saw a meeting of the Brixworth Planning Committee to discuss an application by Mercedes High Performance Engines to erect two wind turbines on their premises at Brixworth.

Wind Turbine application at Mercedes-Benz HighPerformanceEngines

Mercedes-Benz HighPerformanceEngines and Wind Direct would like to confirm that they have temporarily withdrawn their planning application for two wind turbines in Brixworth in order to allow additional information to be provided to Daventry District Council.

This will enable a more informed decision on the project.

Mercedes-Benz HighPerformanceEngines and Wind Direct intend to resubmit the application early in the New Year. We would like to take the opportunity to consult with local residents and stakeholders during this period and have also decided to postpone the exhibition due to be held on the 13^th November until the new year.

If you have any further enquiries, please contact Peter Kubiena on 01604 880100 or e-mail: publicity@mercedes-benz-hpe.com

Following an assessment of ‘RAF Harrington’ as a wind farm site, Nuon Renewables will be presenting their findings and plans at the Loder Hall, Maidwell, on the evening of Friday 14th November, 6:00 to 9:00pm, and on Saturday 15th November between 9:30am and 4:00pm.  They are inviting members of the public to “meet the Nuon team, find out more, and have your questions answered.”

The Say No to Harrington Wind Farm action group would urge all residents of villages in proximity to the Harrington site to go and get the facts as presented by the “Nuon Team” and to find out why Nuon believe the erection and operation of turbines in an area of known low wind speed is preferable to coastal or offshore sites and what the economical facts really are.  Perhaps Nuon can also explain how and where they propose connecting to the National Grid.

Nuon now have a  website dedicated to this proposal:

http://www.harringtonwindfarm.co.uk

where details of the planned wind farm can be seen from the viewpoint of the developers.  The web site is not fully functional as yet and we wonder whether they will allow space for open comments, both for and against, in the same way as this web site does.  We also wonder whether they will provide a reciprocal link to this site!  Did someone mention bias?