first lie, is the pretence that turbines are anything other than ludicrously inefficient, the most glaring dishonesty peddled by the wind industry — and echoed by gullible politicians — is vastly to exaggerate the output of turbines, as they increase in number (the Government wants to see 10,000 more in the next few years) it will, quite farcically, become necessary to build a dozen or more gas-fired power stations, running all the time and emitting CO2, simply to provide instant back-up for when the wind drops, (the people that bang on about wind farms have yet to realise there are windless days, so where do they think the electricity will come from?),
the second great lie about wind power is the pretence that it is not a preposterously expensive way to produce electricity, no one would dream of building wind turbines unless they were guaranteed a huge government subsidy, this comes in the form of the Renewables Obligation Certificate subsidy scheme, paid for through household bills, whereby owners of wind turbines earn an additional £49 for every 'megawatt hour' they produce, and twice that sum for offshore turbines, when a Swedish firm recently opened what is now the world's largest offshore windfarm off the coast of Kent, (notice how gullible we are? the world's largest, no other country would fall for it!), at a cost of £800million, we were told that its 'capacity' was 300 megawatts, enough to provide 'green' power for tens of thousands of homes, what we were not told was that its actual output will average only a mere 80 megawatts, a tenth of that supplied by a gas-fired power station — for which we will all be paying a subsidy of £60million a year, or £1.5billion over the 25-year lifespan of the turbines, money to burn, to appease the tree huggers and greenies I guess is another way of looking at it,
the third great lie of the wind propagandists is that this industry is somehow making a vital contribution to 'saving the planet' by cutting our emissions of CO2, even if you believe that curbing our use of fossil fuels could change the Earth's climate, the CO2 reduction achieved by wind turbines is so insignificant that one large windfarm saves considerably less in a year than is given off over the same period by a single jumbo jet flying daily between Britain and America, then, of course, the construction of the turbines generates enormous CO2 emissions as a result of the mining and smelting of the metals used, the carbon-intensive cement needed for their huge concrete foundations, the building of miles of road often needed to move them to the site, and the releasing of immense quantities of CO2 locked up in the peat bogs where many turbines are built, when you consider, too, those gas-fired power stations wastefully running 24 hours a day just to provide back-up for the intermittency of the wind, any savings will vanish altogether, I have to admit I have reproduced extensively from the article by Christopher Booker, we seem to agree on many issues like this, at last some one else is seeing the expensive truth and is a in a position to bring it to the attention of others, I just hope some one in power will follow Holland's lead.
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