Windfarms More Efficient than Biofuels?

- by Aidan Har­ri­son, Decem­ber 5, 2014, Northum­ber­land Gazette

Its obses­sion with ‘mar­kets’ has already placed our rail­ways and util­i­ties in the hands of big for­eign state and cor­po­rate-owned monopolies.

The first thing to make clear is that the tech­nol­o­gy of wind pow­er is noth­ing like as inef­fi­cient as its fanat­i­cal detrac­tors claim.

In terms of ener­gy returned on ener­gy invest­ed (EROEI), it is bet­ter than nuclear and shale gas, yet safe and clean.

It is infi­nite­ly more ener­gy-effi­cient than util­is­ing good farm­land for bio­fu­el pro­duc­tion. Nine­ty-sev­en per cent of the dash for tur­bines is out­side the UK, with such polit­i­cal­ly diverse places as Chi­na, Chile and Texas pil­ing into wind pow­er. Can the rest of the world real­ly be so wrong?

The lat­est fig­ures show that in Octo­ber, Scotland’s wind tur­bines pro­duced more Kw/hrs than the coun­try consumed.

Yes, they receive tax­pay­er sup­port, but only a tiny frac­tion of the mon­ey which our Gov­ern­ment has promised to France and Com­mu­nist Chi­na for build­ing two nuclear pow­er sta­tions in Somerset.

In the more gen­uine democ­ra­cies, wind­farms and oth­er renew­ables are read­i­ly accept­ed because they are much more under the con­trol of local com­mu­ni­ties who, in turn, ben­e­fit from the cheap pow­er they produce.

In con­trast, our Gov­ern­ment has devised an anti-local, anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic sys­tem where the big, for­eign cor­po­ra­tions installing them give some of our tax mon­ey to the (often absen­tee) landown­er. It is hard­ly sur­pris­ing that local com­mu­ni­ties who receive no ben­e­fit resent their imposition.

It is dis­grace­ful that so much of the mon­ey added to our ener­gy bills to sup­port renew­ables only ben­e­fits already wealthy landown­ers for wind tur­bines and also those with large coun­try hous­es and adjoin­ing cot­tages who are the lucky minor­i­ty able to meet the tight cri­te­ria ‘enti­tling’ them to large sums from ordi­nary people’s bills to warm their chilly man­sions with bio­mass heat­ing systems.

Why, Ms Truss? She was accom­pa­nied on her vis­it by anti-wind cam­paign­er and Con­ser­v­a­tive prospec­tive can­di­date Anne-Marie Trevelyan.

I agree with Ms Trevelyan’s state­ment that ‘it is an entire­ly unac­cept­able sit­u­a­tion affect­ing the poor­est the most as they strug­gle to pay their fuel bills’.

I only hope that she has stuck to her prin­ci­ples and is not among those own­ers of state­ly homes who have accept­ed large amounts of pub­lic mon­ey to finance 25 years of cosy warmth from their vast bio­mass boil­ers at the expense of ‘the poor man at the gate’ who has to pick up the tab for their lux­u­ry and com­fort through the enhanced ener­gy bills she mentions.