KILLING MACHINES (2)

The other day I wrote about the killing of countless birds and bats by those wind turbines that sprout up in all the wind farms. I have always wondered about the cost effectiveness of wind farms and whether they will ever make a real impact on the emission of greenhouse gasses.

I am not the only questioning the cost effectiveness of these killing machines. Here are some excerpts from ‘The answer, my friend, ain’t blowing in the wind,’ an op-ed by British author and journalist Richard Littlejohn that was published in the June 10 issue of Mail Online:

At midday yesterday, wind power was contributing just 2.2 per cent of all the electricity in the National Grid. You might think that’s a pretty poor return on the billions of pounds spent already on Britain’s standing army of windmills.

But it’s actually a significant improvement on the last time I checked the wholesale electricity industry’s official website. At the turn of the year, the figure was 1.6 per cent. During the cold snap the turbines had to be heated to stop them freezing and were actually consuming more electricity than they generated.

Even on a good day, they rarely work above a quarter of their theoretical capacity. And in high winds they have to be turned off altogether to prevent damage. Britain’s 3,426 wind turbines produce no more electricity than a single, medium-sized gas-fired power station.

Any sane individual would conclude that wind generation is hopelessly inefficient and horribly expensive and stop throwing good money after bad.
But when did sanity ever have anything to do with government policy?

Ministers are planning to install another 12,500 of these worse-than-useless windmills, some of them up to three times the size of existing monstrosities.

We are paying for all this through hidden charges which now make up a fifth of all gas and electricity bills. The average household has to fork out an extra £200 a year.

That’s because the Government forces energy companies to buy from renewable sources, which are far more expensive than conventional power stations. The cost is then passed on to the consumer.

Ministers know there would be an outcry if they raised taxes to pay for windmills, so they hide the subsidies in our gas and electricity bills and hope the energy companies get the blame.

It’s not even as if there are tens of thousands of jobs being created in Britain by the ‘green economy’. The wind turbines are all built and installed by foreign firms. British taxpayers are subsidizing companies in Germany, Spain and Japan.

Politicians are putting our economic recovery at risk by posturing over ‘global warming’ and dragging their feet over the obvious and urgent solution of building more clean, safe nuclear power stations.