Lagging the Roof with Davey

At last! A morsel of common sense from the great and good.  ( See Guardian HERE ). Insulating houses and so REDUCING energy demand is fundamentally a very sound idea.

Household insulation should be at the very front of the government policy and if anything should get a subsidy it should be insulation.

But regrettably our esteemed leaders are still proud wind turbine fashionistas, even though it is these very wind turbines that will undo the good work done by the insulation and force many more thousands into fuel poverty.

Ed Davey, the new Huhne clone has announced that insulation can save as much as 2 Nuclear power stations. (see the above link)

Now I imagine that means a total power of about 2 GW (i.e. two Sizewell B's).

So let us do a comparison with an "average" on-shore wind turbine which is 2MW but has a capacity factor of 25% or less (in the South West - much less).

A little maths tells us that instead of supplanting 2 nuclear power station that produce reliable "dispatchable" power we could .......

dispense with  4000 unreliable, intermittent and massively subsidised wind turbines instead.

(yes that is not a misprint - FOUR THOUSAND - every land based bird mincer in the country plus some more..)

let's see.....

Close down 2  effective nuclear power plants?

Or 4000 ineffective wind turbines?

I know which I would choose.

Not only would we be free of these hopeless white elephants, but the money we would save on NOT paying the ROC subsidy would pay for the whole of the subsidised household insulation - for every home in the country.

The final icing on the cake would be the 250,000 households that would NOT be pushed into fuel poverty simply to line the pockets of the wind turbine carpet baggers.