Vent de Colère !
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FEDERATION NATIONALE
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www.ventdecolere.org
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Article Original
I described the claim that it would be the answer to all our future energy problems as a catastrophic failure of
judgment. I feared that windpower was stupendously inefficient and ludicrously expensive and that by falling for the
greatest energy hoax of our time, the Labour government could be consigning Britain to a very dark future.
So unreliable are wind turbines — thanks to the wind’s constant vagaries — that they are one of the most inefficient
means of producing electricity ever devised.
Change of heart? In 2008 Cameron agreed that for Britain to meet our commitment to the EU that, by 2020, wind
farms were the best option
Indeed, the amount of power they generate is so derisory that, even now, when we have built 3,500 turbines, the
average amount of power we get from all of them combined is no more than what we get from a single medium-
size, gas-fired power station, built at only fraction of the cost.
No one would dream of building windfarms unless the Government had arranged to pay their developers a subsidy
of 100 per cent on all the power they produce, paid for by all of us through a hidden charge on our electricity bills.
The only way the industry managed to fool politicians into accepting this crazy deal was by subterfuge — referring
to turbines only in terms of their ‘capacity’ (i.e. what they could produce if the wind was blowing at optimum speeds
24
hours of every day). The truth is that their average actual output is barely a quarter of that figure.
Yet it was on this deception that the industry managed to fool pretty well everyone that windfarms could make a
contribution to Britain’s energy needs four times larger than reality — and thus was ‘the great wind scam’ launched
on its way.
Joyous :
This declaration will delight thousands of communities who have campaigned to prevent a turbine being
built near them
For years our politicians continued to fall for this racket, as they ruthlessly bent the planning rules to ensure that
nothing stood in the way of the turbines.
Meanwhile, ever more rural communities fought to stop the countryside around their homes being threatened with
these monsters.
At long last, the penny began to drop with a growing number of MPs being besieged by constituents who wanted to
know why our green and pleasant land should be disfigured for no obvious purpose other than to enrich the
developers, and landowners such as David Cameron’s father-in-law Sir Reginald Sheffield, who has cheerfully
admitted that the turbines on his Lincolnshire estate earn him £1,000 a day.
Earlier this year, 100 MPs, led by Chris Heaton-Harris, MP for Daventry, called for an end to building any more
onshore turbines, on the grounds that the public should no longer be expected to pay out hundreds of millions of
pounds a year in subsidies for something which was both useless and a crazy waste of money.
It was this groundswell of opposition, coming mainly from the Tory shires but winning support from MPs of all
parties, which recently led David Cameron to appoint John Hayes as our new Energy Minister — with the private
brief that he must find a way to curb those windfarms which are so massively unpopular.
Hence last night’s startling U-turn — which will destroy the long-standing all-party consensus on the issue.
The Lib Dems — led by our technically illiterate Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey — the Labour
Party and Brussels will scarcely be able to contain their anger.
For countless others, this blast of realism will send up a cheer of relief across Britain — apart from Scotland, which
has devolved powers. First Minister Alex Salmond has laughably pledged that, within eight years, it must derive all
its electricity from ‘renewables’. (He has never explained what happens when the wind drops.)
In terms of seeing off the great wind delusion, however, this is only what Churchill once described as ‘the end of the
beginning’.
Pitiful
When all those MPs finally became brave enough to recognise that onshore wind turbines are both useless
and a waste of money, what they omitted to say was that the same objections apply twice over to those we are
erecting in the seas around our coasts.
It’s not just that the thousands of offshore turbines that the Government still wants built will not only produce
amounts of electricity scarcely less pitiful than those onshore. Because they are so much more expensive to build,
they attract subsidies not at 100 per cent but at 200 per cent.
Thus, every reason that led John Hayes to strike such a blow yesterday for common sense in respect of onshore
windfarms also applies, with redoubled force, to those vast offshore wind factories.
Until our politicians finally have the courage of their newfound convictions and halt this madness, too, one of the
most bizarre follies of our age will not have been finally chucked where it belongs — firmly into the rubbish bin of
history.