Wind Power is Just Smoke....

The British are being suckered....

Even in these dark times, it is still possible to be shocked when our Prime Minister personally endorses a flagrant perversion of the truth. Last year, for example, many of us felt outraged when Gordon Brown pretended that the Lisbon Treaty was somehow totally different from the EU Constitution, in order to wriggle out of his party's manifesto promise of a referendum. Last week Mr Brown in effect did it again when he endorsed the deception at the heart of his Government's wildly exaggerated claims about the benefits of using wind to make electricity.

In a video for the British Wind Energy Association, the industry's chief lobby group, Mr Brown claimed: "We are now getting 3 gigawatts of our electricity capacity from wind power, enough to power more than 1.5 million homes."

This deliberately perpetuates the central confidence trick practised by the wind industry, by confusing "capacity" with the actual amount of electricity wind produces. In fact, as the Government's own figures show, wind turbines generate on average only 27 to 28 per cent, barely a quarter, of their "capacity".

In other words, far from producing those "3 gigawatts", the 2,000 turbines already built actually contributed - again on official figures - an average of only 694 megawatts (MW) last year, less than the output of a single medium-size conventional power station. Far from producing "enough to power more than 1.5 million homes", it is enough to power barely a sixth of that number, representing only 1.3 per cent of all the electricity we use. Yet for this we have already blighted thousands of square miles of countryside, at a cost of billions of pounds.

Indeed, at the same BWEA-sponsored event, Mike O'Brien, energy minister, went on to perpetuate the second confidence trick practised by both Government and industry, which is to conceal the fact that all this is only made possible by the huge hidden subsidy given to wind energy through the Renewables Obligation. This compels electricity companies to pay way over the odds for the power generated by wind turbines, a burden passed on to us all in our electricity bills.

Mr O'Brien claimed that the cost of electricity generated by offshore wind turbines would drop by 8 per cent, failing to explain that it would then be raised by 50 per cent through the hidden subsidy. He then soared even further into make-believe by saying that he was "assessing plans" to build a further 25GW-worth of offshore turbines by 2020, "enough electricity for every home in the country".

Mr O'Brien must know that there is not the remotest chance that we could build the 10,000 monster turbines needed to achieve this, at a rate of more than two a day, when it takes weeks to instal each vast machine. At present, of the giant barges needed for the work, there is only one in the world. Even if it were possible, the construction costs alone, on current figures, would be anything up to £100 billion - the price of 37 nuclear power stations, capable of producing nearly 10 times as much electricity - while the subsidies alone would add £6 billiion a year more, or 25 per cent, to our electricity bills.

Why do our ministers think they can get away with talking such nonsense?