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From The Sunday Times

January 27, 2008

Wind farms turn huge profit with help of subsidies

Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor

LAVISH subsidies and high electricity prices have turned Britain’s onshore wind farms into an extraordinary moneyspinner, with a single turbine capable of generating £500,000 of pure profit per year.

According to new industry figures, a typical 2 megawatt (2MW) turbine can now generate power worth £200,000 on the wholesale markets - plus another £300,000 of subsidy from taxpayers.

Since such turbines cost around £2m to build and last for 20 or more years, it means they can pay for themselves in just 4-5 years and then produce nothing but profit.

The lucrative outlook has led to a surge in planning applications for new windfarms. There are already 165 wind farms operating 1,944 turbines in Britain but another 34 are under construction, a further 118 have planning consent and 220 are under consideration, according to new figures from the British Wind Energy Association.

If they are all built it would mean up to 4,000 more turbines being constructed across Britain - a prospect that is also generating a wave of protest.

Around 140 groups have been set up around the country to oppose wind farm projects, citing fears of noise and light flicker from the rotating blades and the impact the turbines will have on the landscape.

John Webley is chairman of the Kentish Weald Action Group against wind turbines in rural Kent, whose 200 members are fighting plans for a 415ft turbine planned near the village of Marden and financed by HgCapital, a City investment firm.

He said: “This would ruin a beautiful rural landscape and is far too close to homes whose residents’ lives would be ruined and properties lose value.”

Some experts question whether wind farms give good value for money. Among them is Dieter Helm, professor of energy policy at Oxford University, who calculates that it costs consumers up to £510 for each tonne of CO2 emissions avoided through wind energy.

“The level of subsidy for onshore wind farms is very high and it distorts the market, making it more attractive to invest there than in other technologies like solar power,” he said.

Ofgem is also concerned. “We calculate that renewable energy subsidies will add £60 to consumer bills this year and that will keep rising,” said a spokesman.

Defenders of renewables point out that wind turbines are a relatively new technology facing an entrenched fossil fuel industry and so need help to get going.

Dale Vince, founder of Ecotricity, which has 12 small wind farms, said: “The reality is that climate change is the biggest threat humanity has faced. We need every bit of green energy we can get and those who say otherwise are simply wrong and selfish.”

A crucial issue for turbine profitability is the so-called load factor – the proportion of power generated compared with the theoretical maximum. According to government statistics, the average load factor for turbines in 2006 was 27.4%, meaning a typical 2MW turbine actually produced only 0.54MW on average.

The subsidy system means, however, that turbines can make a profit even when they are operating at very low load factors.

The worst performing turbine in Britain is said to have a load factor of just 7%, meaning it produces a fourteenth of the power it was designed for. Two former senior Ofgem executives have cast doubt on claims by energy companies that the recent 15% increase in household bills is due to the higher cost of wholesale gas and electricity.

The executives, who left only recently, say Ofgem has been far too weak. They point out that the wholesale market price of energy is largely irrelevant to the big six companies because they tend to supply their own energy or have long-term deals with power generators.

One said: “There is a problem in the wholesale markets which Ofgem has failed to get to grips with. The wholesale prices don’t represent what the energy companies are actually paying.”

From The Times

January 1, 2008

Land of pointless propellers

Wind turbines will despoil the countryside and distract us from the inevitibility of nuclear power

Sir, Debates in the press and these columns regarding the Government’s offshore wind turbine initiative have paid too little attention to the continuing threat to the British countryside and people’s homes arising from onshore wind turbine applications currently under way.

The conservation group Country Guardian lists, on its website, more than 150 action groups that are fighting these proposals. Beautiful parts of Britain are being destroyed, and there is anger that wind development companies are being allowed to cynically exploit the weakness in planning regulations that allows turbines to be sited far too close to homes.

President Sarkozy, addressing the Grenelle Environment Summit in October, announced the end of industrial wind turbines in rural France, stating that they should, rather, be built on brownfield sites. He also added: “Frankly, when I fly over a number of European countries, what I see does not recommend wind energy.” France’s switch in policy, unreported in the British press, followed a demonstration by representatives of more than 800 French villages under threat. It is time that the politicians in this country followed suit. Subsidies for onshore wind turbines should be stopped and planners told that applications will only be approved on brownfield sites — if at all.

John Webley
Horsmonden, Kent

Sir, I have read Mr David Cameron’s green paper “Power to the people” in its entirety. As a chartered engineer of more than 40 years experience in the UK electricity industry, I find its treatment of this complex and vital subject profound only in its naivety.

Meanwhile, our Government, as evidenced by Mr John Hutton’s recent “seven thousand offshore wind turbines” speech in Germany, is still not grasping the nettle of nuclear power, which is the only green solution to the massive electricity generation shortage rapidly approaching.

France, which decided to “go nuclear” more than 30 years ago, now generates the cheapest and cleanest electricity in Europe, and is building (and plans to build one annually) the biggest nuclear steam turbine unit in the world, thus endorsing yet again the economies of scale that were pioneered successfully by the UK nationalised electricity industry more than 50 years ago. Microgeneration, on the scale promoted by Mr Cameron, is an economic and practical fallacy.

Alan Shaw
Norwich

Sir, We don’t have enough gas or oil left in the North Sea, wind farms only work when it’s windy and we cannot turn all our agriculture over to biofuel, so there is only one answer and that is nuclear energy.

Whereas the US has vast untapped Alaskan resources, we have the Isles of Scilly. If we don’t face this harsh reality soon, we will become increasingly reliant on Moscow, and eventually become a backwater island drowning in debt.

S. T. Vaughan
Birmingham

 

• Have your say

Wind "power" ?? Power is only created when the wind blows strongly,but not too strongly, so in the case of the wind "factory" near my home that means that only about 24% of the time is actual power produced.
There is much talk about security of supply. Most wind "factories" are "controlled" from other countries within the EU, mainly Germany. How then can our power supply be said to be secure when we cant control the on and off button?
The noise and vibrations caused by these turbines can be devastating - we have had to abandon our home and rent a house 5 miles away just to be able to sleep. The noise condition imposed by planning permisssion is in fact not measurable as it requires turbine noise to be measured agaianst background noise and our local Council has said that it cannot determine the background noise when the turbines are running as teh noise is all encompassing. The jury is still out as to whether low frequency sound causes health deficits, but the moles have left..

Jane Davis, Spalding, UK

While we wait in vain for the Government to agree an energy strategy which ensures that people are not forced to live close to noisy, inefficient, unreliable wind turbines, we will have to watch whilst landowners and wind turbine developers scurry round covering the land with turbines in order to extract the last ounce of profit.

Fiona, Brechin,

Electricity makes up roughly 1/3 of our primary energy demand. Heat and transport account in roughly equal part for the other 2/3. Twice as much of our gas demand is for heat as for electricity. Gas fires around 40% of our electricity production, but almost all of our heat production.

Nuclear power can make a minimal contribution to our transport and heat needs. If we replaced all of our nuclear power stations with a new generation, it would still only account for around 7% of our primary energy demand, and around 3.5% of our final consumption. The Government's plans for wind are unrealistic, but so is relying on nuclear. The Establishment's corporatist obsession with marginal electricity-generation technology is blinkered.

The Russians (and others) are highly unlikely to turn off the taps (they want the money), but they might try to push up prices, or supply interruptions may occur. If so, little old ladies will have to worry more about freezing than about the lights going out.

Bruno Prior, Maidenhead, England