How about wind farms without wind???

You'd think they'd have figured out to put wind farms where the wind is...

For anyone building a wind farm, it might seem an unnecessary piece of advice - put it somewhere windy.

Astonishingly, however, many turbines are going up on sites which are simply not breezy enough, energy consultants have claimed.

They say farms are being built in the "wrong places" because of the pressure to hit Government targets in the race to produce green energy.

But the "badly sited and underperforming" turbines are not reliable enough to keep the nation's television sets, toasters and lights switched on.

Michael Jefferson, an independent engineering consultant and former economist for Shell, said the industry often exaggerated the amount of energy each farm would supply.

New sites are assessed on the basis of average wind speeds over a year - a measure called the "load factor".

The industry recommends an average load factor of 30 per cent for a turbine to operate efficiently.

Yet although the load factor can be as high as 45 per cent in parts of Scotland and Wales, some farms achieve less than 20 per cent, he said.

Only five wind farms in the east of England achieve load factors of 30 per cent or more: "That's just five out of 25," he said.