Whales, Wind Turbines and Fukushima

A picture speaks a thousand words. But those words may not be the ones intended by those whose action inspired the image.

Here we have a sad image of a dead whale lying on a Lincolnshire beach. Evidently a pod became confused and made the fatal mistake of swimming into ever shallower water. Their food supply diminished and they probably died from dehydration. (Whales get the fluid from their food)

Whales becoming confused and dying is sadly a natural event. It occurs many times a year all over the world. These events have happened over many millenia.

But why did these Whales get confused? What possible man-made influence could have affected this tragedy?

There are those who idiotically believe that any such event must always be the fault of man. These events are always man-made and they believe that without question.

Driven by their fashionable paranoia, they always quick to point fingers at their standard bogey men. "The Military", "The Oil Industry" are to name but two.

But it takes a particular type of vacuous idiot to scrawl "Fukishima" (sic) on a dead whale that died 9000 Kilometers away from a contained accident that happened nearly five years ago.

Especially as the idiot studiously ignores a more probable cause that can be clearly seen in the background of the photograph. (It would also be a good idea if the idiot learned to spell Fukushima as well).

So, is it likely that nearby ineffective offshore windfarms caused this tragedy?

True - offshore windfarms have massively unreliable gearboxes and produce ridiculously expensive intermittent electricity. But are they Whale killers?

Probably not.

These useless totems to stupidity would obviously be a more realistic contender than a 5 year old nuclear accident that happened half a world away.

But the death of these whales is most probably just another random act of nature.

The Trouble with Energy Storage

Energy Storage - The Holy Grail for intermittent electrical generators.

Reading the tweets and articles from the wind and solar industries (and their avid followers) you could be forgiven for thinking that large scale energy storage was a done deal. Something that just needed the bureaucrats in Westminster or Berlin or Washington to rubber stamp.

Sadly though, large scale wind/solar energy storage is not only not a done deal it is not even on the horizon. Even if it was it would still be very far from being a “solution” to intermittent and dilute electrical generation. But more on why that is in a later post.

First of all lets be clear about what I mean by energy storage.

In a way, all current thermal generation and hydro depend on “energy storage” The difference between energy storage at (say) a coal plant and a wind farm is that the coal plant stores its energy pre-generation (i.e. as raw fuel) whereas a wind turbine has to convert its energy into a non-electrical form after excessive generation in order to store it. So the wind turbine has to convert its excess energy into some form of fuel to be stored for later use. The coal plant simply does not use the fuel until it is needed.

(by the way I am using coal plant here because it is a good comparator – not because I am a fan of coal generation – I prefer nuclear)

Typically the front runners for renewable energy post generation fuel storage revolve around two technologies:

1. Pumped hydro (pumping water up hill into a reservoir)
2. Or as is the fashion - in some form of Battery.

Pumped Hydro.

Pumped hydro is an old and proven technology. It existed a long time before the current wind/solar obsessions. Originally pumped storage facilities ( like Dinorwig in Wales) were built to store energy when the price was low (typically at night) and then sell that stored energy at peak demand (when prices were high). Using this model, pumped hydro works very well. It is a profitable and very worthwhile addition to the Grid.

But things change when you try and use it to store excess solar and wind energy. You essentially break the pumped hydro economic model, especially with solar PV. (See Speigel Online article here )

You have to buy in energy when prices and demand is high while sacrificing your profitable market as well. Then you then have to sell on when prices and demand is low.

It does not work. Even if you created some subsidy regime to support this broken model, the number of potential pumped hydro sites are very limited anyway.

But at least, individual pumped hydro sites can store relatively large quantities of electricity.

Although UK pumped hydro could not deliver the energy quickly enough to actually take over the whole UK grid, they do hold enough energy to power the entire UK grid for about 1 hour. 

While that may not sound much, it is overwhelmingly better than any form of battery storage.

When we get to battery style storage the practicality and price viability of large scale energy storage falls off a very high cliff.

Batteries

The biggest battery in Europe is in Leighton Buzzard in the UK. It can store 10MWh of electricity. It could (say) store half the output from a single small 10MW wind farm running at maximum output for two hours. It cost £20 Million. An average UK demand is around 30GWh. So this single battery would power the entire UK grid for about 1.2 seconds.

OK, you may say – let us distribute/duplicate it and use a cheaper technology After all why not have a cheaper 10MWh battery for every (say) 5 wind turbines? You know - Spread it out a bit.

Lets look at the (arguably) most viable and cost effective large scale battery technology available today – Vanadium Redox flow batteries.

(Incidentally - this is VERY clever technology and has many potential applications – I am not knocking the technology – only the application) .

Flow batteries store the energy in the electrolyte. The consequence of this is that theoretically the only limitation to the their storage capacity is the amount of electrolyte you can to store. 

Currently Vanadium Redox batteries store about 20 Wh per litre of electrolyte. So for 10MWh you need to store around 500,000 litres of highly corrosive Sulphuric Acid based electrolyte.

Lets say technical innovation decreases that by a factor of 10. You would still need to pump/store/process 50,000 litres or nearly 100 tonnes of electrolyte. 

That is for 10 MWh. Or 1.2 seconds of nationwide supply.

So, why not just store more electrolyte? Simple eh?

But remember, this stuff is lethal. It is massively corrosive and is a liquid. Then remember this is one SMALL wind farm.

Multiply that by thousands of wind farms. Then avoid killing anyone or regularly risking massive environmental pollution. That really is a challenge!

Of course there are other technologies (Lithium-ion being the other main and more expensive player) but whatever you look at, the problems of large scale energy storage are immense. They are effectively intractable.

Remember, what I have discussed above is the LATEST and most promising technologies. On Twitter people often eulogize about lead-acid batteries or compressed air, but really their capabilities are far below pumped hydro or flow batteries.

But Tom Murphy on his appropriately named blog Do The Math has done a very good analysis of a theoretical (USA) National Lead Acid Battery and its practicalities On this Link

A very interesting post on the EROEI (Energy Returned On Energy Invested) on  storage with RE has been written by John Morgan  On This Link

Large scale post generation energy storage is not viable.

Bit even worse – not only is it not viable, it is also potentially very, very (and appallingly) dangerous.

But more on that in another post.

(Here I am not considering issues with charge/discharge rates, resource availability or lifetime cycle expectancy – they all just make things worse)

Wind Corporation Games

Go back to 2009. That was the year Vestas closed their wind turbine blade manufacturing plant on the Isle of Wight.

It was an ugly messy affair. 

Hundreds of people were thrown out of work. A group of the work force occupied the factory. Some redundancy payments were refused and folk were reduced to severe economic hardship. (Telegraph Report Here) (On the Wight Report Here)

Why did all this happen? The company stated that there was no market for wind turbines in the UK. (Business Green report Here)

Remember this was right in the middle of the government sponsored planning orgy that allowed massive wind turbine deployment across the UK. This calamity has effectively industrialised large areas of previously rural or wild land.

So Vestas' stated reason was (how should we say...) economical with the truth. Perhaps they knew that the government was so in-thrall to the wind industry that closing down their Isle of Wight factory would have little effect their market share.

The same year they went on to employ another 5000 people in China, the USA and Spain. But it was not just the Isle of Wight that took a hammering. In Scandinavia (including Denmark itself), 3000 loyal employees (properly paid and working in unsubsidised factories) were made redundant.

Factories and employees that had built up the Vestas business were cast off like used Kleenexe. Meanwhile Vestas slavered over cheap labour, subsidies and the political leverage of bringing “employment” to hard hit areas.

In a ruthlessly globalist and morally repugnant way Vestas actually expanded its work force in 2009.

Now come forward to the present day.

All of a sudden, in a great fanfare of Green Roo-ha-ha Vestas are back.

With a perverse sense of deja-vu they plan to set up a manufacturing facility on the Isle Wight and in total bring 800 jobs to the UK specifically to manufacture offshore wind turbine blades.

The exact number destined for the Isle of Wight is unclear.

So why is this corporate monster so keen all of a sudden to kiss and make up with the unemployed on the Isle of Wight?

I think the answer comes in a single ugly coast scarring phrase. Navitus Bay.

Navitus Bay is the name given to a huge wind farm planned to lie just offshore of the Jurassic Coast and the golden sands of Bournemouth Bay. By “sheer conincidence” it is currently going through the planning approval stage

Navitus is in trouble. They were hoping to steam-roller their money making scheme though the planning process but they have met stiff opposition from everyone from local councils, international environmental organisations (Unesco), local MPs and rank and file local residents. The number of written objections to this proposed calamity is now a national record.

Navitus plan to spend around £800 million on turbines. So wouldn't it be rather convenient if at this point in time local jobs were hostage to offshore turbine orders, and those orders were in turn dependent on getting approval for this ruinous industrial wind complex?

I have three predictions:

Prediction One:

If things get tough for Navitus (which I sincerely hope they will) all of a sudden you will get rumblings from Vestas about “unwilling to invest in jobs in a hostile environment” or some other such bullshit.

Assorted political lackys will then line up to warn how rejecting Navitus will “destroy Green jobs”. Even though Vestas has been quite effective at doing that on the Isle of Wight already.

Prediction Two:

God forbid. If this monstrosity were ever to be built, then its going to be Vestas turbines all the way.

Prediction Three:

Finally as to the “new” Vestas jobs:

Navitus Bay threatens to destroy a huge number of jobs and seriously impact the tourist industry all along this coast. The jobs brought to the Isle of Wight by Vestas will be but a drop in the ocean compared to those lost.

But I predict the jobs building turbine blades will be safe. That is until they are needed elsewhere in the world to exert some political influence or, in true ugly globalist fashion, the Isle of Wight workforce can be undercut and their jobs exported.

Remember especially with this last point, Vestas already have a track record.

Lovelock: Adapt and Survive

In an opinion paper, Dr James Hansen has recently posed the following question:

"Do Scientists Have a Duty to Expose Popular Misconceptions?"

Dr Hansen then went on and answered his own question by blasting away vigorously at some choice misconceptions and at the medieval self serving bigotry that so often defeats (or at least holds back) scientific, technological and social progress.

(His paper is Here - it is well worth a read)

Whether by coincidence or not, the Grand Old Man of Rational Environmentalism, Dr James Lovelock CH, CBE, FRS is first to take up Hansen's call to arms.

In a new Channel 4 video ( This Link ) he expounds on the benefits of Nuclear, the sheer stupidity of wind farms and also expresses his reasoned support for fracking.

Although now 92 years old his sharpness and lucidity clearly rattle his interviewer, who was no doubt expecting somewhat less forthright (and more conformist) views.

The video, along with a commentary is in This Link to the relevent Channel 4 blog page:

Enjoy. (I did)

Fiddling Wind Turbine Images

I had to smile when I read a comment from a local windy on one of my posts accusing the local action group (DART) of inflating turbine image size on one of their flyers. ( Comment 5 on this post )

Here is part of what the windy's comment:
[quote]
I've seen the leaflets that DART circulated, with an image of turbines we estimated were 4 times bigger than the proposed ones. Who wouldn't be horrified by that and sign a petition?
[unquote]

Yes. I agree. But actually, I would bet that what the windy really meant was 4 times bigger than the propaganda images produced by their beloved developer .

As reported in ( This Article ), a prominent Scottish architect along with Stirling University has been conducting research into how various wind farm developers have been cleverly fiddling images to make their wind farms appear less intrusive.

Take these two example images taken from the same location (see the above article) that show the deception. Notice both images are the same width and you can see all of both images.

The top image uses a wide angle lens to give a panoramic view that is well outside the real  field of view of an observer. This is then presented as an image at close range, so then all of the panorama is seen by the observer. The consequence is that the turbines (and buildings for that matter) are reduced and appear much less consequential than in reality. The bottom image shows the view more realistically with a field of view similar to that of a real observer.

There are rules governing these photo montages, but there are loopholes. These loopholes are ruthlessly exploited by the carpet baggers, leading to results similar to that achieved in the top image.

Now, when I look at the example images above, to me, it looks like the bogus pro-wind like propaganda image presents the turbines at about a quarter size of the more realistic bottom photograph.

I don't know if the DART flyer actually did present the turbines a four times larger than the Infinergy images. I didn't see it. But if they did it looks like DART probably got it about right.

So maybe, in the future, perhaps my windie commentator should do as they suggested and "be horrified and sign the petition".

You know it makes sense.

Love & Kisses
Billothewisp

ROC and Roll Rip-offs

The ROC is the veiled subsidy paid to wind turbine operators. Every MW/hr generated by a turbine operator gains the turbine operator a ROC certificate. This certificate is then sold to fossil fuel generators. These fossil fuel generators are forced to buy these certificates or they have to pay a fine.

At the end of the day, due to the ROC, an on-shore turbine operator gets paid about double for the electricity produced. An off-shore operator gets paid triple.

If we ever managed to produce 20% of our power by wind it would account for at least 50% of the wholesale cost.

The naive political theory behind these massive subsidies is that they were supposed to kick start a whole new industry. This industry would then magically develop ever more effective and reliable wind turbines. (Oh Boy - do they need to be more effective and reliable!)

Unfortunately the truth is very far from the hype.

As the fairy-land theory goes, in the scenario of 100% "renewable" supply the ROC would become redundant, and we would have a vibrant industry developing and producing competitive alternative energy for us and the rest of the world.

Dream on.

Unfortunately this attempt at forced development neglects several very important aspects which are more related to physics and basic economics than political wishful thinking.

First, virtually all of the turbines purchased come from a group of foreign companies. These companies occasionally toss the odd manufacturing bone across the channel when is suites them. But as we saw in the Isle of Wight with Vestas, they are just as keen to maximise their profits at the expense of the workforce as any other ruthless faceless and foreign corporation.

Secondly no turbine in the current turbine fleet could possibly be economically viable without the ROC. The government has recently suggested a measly 10% reduction. This has flown into a hail of objection from the wind turbine lobby.

So if these things become unviable at a mere 10% reduction in the ROC how the hell are you ever going to get to a zero cost ROC? Remember these things are supposed to have a life of 25 years! They are still going to be at least as inefficient and ineffective in 10 -20 years time as they are now.

Of course we must also remember that wind turbines can never replace all fossil fuel generation. Many would say they cannot replace any.

Because wind can never replace much fossil plant there will always be a demand for the ROCs. So our wind turbine carpet bagger friends can always get a good return on their pieces of paper.

They simply have to ensure that their turbines don't actually do what they are hyped up to do. Bearing in mind the physics of the situation (aka Betts Law) this is the defacto situation anyway.

So get used to being ripped off. Until we get a government that is willing to stand up to this ugly wind energy cartel  the robbery will continue.

Bearing in mind how financially involved many senior politicians are with this outrage, change threatens to be a long time coming.

Energy Policy and the Scottish Letter

The letter below appeared in The Scotsman (Here) on the 27th April. To say it ruffled a few feathers would be an understatement.  It is perhaps the most succinct yet powerful indictment of the energy supply policy being pursued in these islands yet published. You will notice it is signed by a star chamber of power generation experts.

On the Scotsman link there is also the "alternative" view. It is signed by those who gain most from this catastrophe of an energy policy. It is the usual spin and obfuscation hiding the emptyness of their position. Have a look. See what you think.
Then read the comments on these two letters. From these comments it sounds to me like the Scots have had enough.

Here is the letter.

[quote]

NO developed economy can function without a reliable and economic supply of electricity but with present UK policies we have been warned that within a few years there will be a risk of power failures while increases in prices to consumers will rise by more than 50 per cent by 2025.

On a standalone basis the situation in Scotland would be even more disastrous. The huge investment required to remedy the neglect and wishful thinking of recent years will require two decades or more to take effect and in the run up to the May elections we urge all political parties in Scotland to put the future of our electricity supplies at the top of their agendas.

The pretence that our electricity can in future be supplied from renewables, mainly wind and marine, has gone on too long. These matters are not a question of opinion; they are answerable to the laws of physics and are readily analysed using normal engineering methods. All of these energy sources are of very low concentrations and intermittent; they are and will remain inherently expensive and no amount of development will have more than a marginal effect on this conclusion.

Nor can wind and marine energy sources be relied on to provide electricity when it is needed; a recent analysis has shown that for over 30 per cent of the time the output from wind farms has dropped to below 10 per cent of their nominal output and during extremely cold weather has fallen to virtually zero. Furthermore it is unfortunately not correct that marine energy constitutes a vast untapped energy resource on our doorstep; studies (now apparently accepted by government) have shown that at best it could provide only a few percent of our electricity supplies and at costs which, including the necessary back up generation, would be entirely unacceptable to consumers.

Fossil fuelled generation (coal or gas) with carbon dioxide capture and underground storage may yet prove a useful technique but it is important to realise that it is an unproven technology on the scale required; that it may never be acceptable to dispose of such huge quantities of gas in underground storage and at present its costs are too uncertain to gamble on its playing a significant part in our forward energy policy.

So by all means let us have some wind power, development programmes for other renewables, home insulation programmes, heat pumps etc but let us not pretend that all these taken together will substitute for proven generation sources such as coal, gas and nuclear.

And if low carbon is to be the principal driver of energy policy, we can build on Scotland's half century of experience with nuclear, generating some 50 per cent of our electricity requirements, reliably and at low cost.

Scotland needs a balanced electricity system which can deliver economic and reliable supplies; we are at the 11th hour and there is now no more time to lose in getting to grips with this task. There can be nothing more urgent on the political agenda.

Colin Gibson C Eng FIEECCMI Network director National Grid 1993-97)

Prof Ken W D Ledingham FInstP

Prof Colin R McInnes FREng FRSE

Sir Donald Miller C EngFREng FRSE, Chairman ScottishPower 1982-92

Prof Anthony Trewavas FRS FRSE

Prof Jack Ponton FREng FIChemE 

[unquote]

Homes and Wind Turbines

So how many “homes” does a wind turbine power?

We all know that there are lies, damn lies and statistics. But there is also lies, greed and manipulation of the truth.

Say you want to desecrate a large area of rural England with wind turbines the height of Salisbury cathedral. You know that these turbines are only viable because of the massive subsidy you get. You know they produce next to nothing in the way of useful electricity. But you need to con the gullible, the wishful thinkers and the Luddites into supporting your ruthless avarice. What do you do?

You make it look homely, warm, benign even.

You describe the output in terms of how many “homes” your monstrosities will power.

But of course, you are, as ever, economical with the truth. Especially when it comes to using simplification to airbrush out the real truth of the matter.

Take this site which offers lots and lots of propaganda for a proposed four turbine complex deep in rural Purbeck. They state their turbines are rated at 2.3 MW. That is 9.2MW in total.

Sounds impressive.

To be fair, they realise that no one is conned by these maximum rating figures.

So when they calculate the number of “homes” they can provide for, they appear to use the pathetic average of one quarter of the boiler-plate rating. In other words each turbines real rating is an average of 0.575 MW. But they do not display this figure. It is after all derisory.

If they then take the average household consumption of electricity as the figure given here   they can offer up that their assertion that this four turbine carbuncle on the face of Purbeck will fuel 5000 homes.

Sounds good. 5000 homes Hmm-mm. Wholesome.

But there is a problem. In fact there are two problems.

The first problem is that while the average output of these things really will be about 0.575MW each and the average requirement for a household really is about 600W, the figure blatantly avoids the demographics of household electricity use.

Households use their energy mainly in well defined time bands. For example their use at 3am is small yet in the early afternoon is at least a couple of kilowatts.

(graph from mpoweruk.com )

Simply put, the average turbine energy output is inadequate at times of peak demand (by at least a factor of four) and at other times the power they produce is unneeded and wasted. These four turbines are not capable of meeting anywhere near the day to day demands of 5000 homes.

But it gets worse.

Wind turbines are governed by the vagaries of the wind and the wind is governed by the certainties of Physics. The power of the wind is proportional to the cube of the wind speed. The harder it blows the more energy there is in the wind.

The result of this is that half of the energy in the wind is delivered to the wind turbine in just 15% of the time.

So half of their annual power output will arrive in a total period of less than 60 days. So not only are they intermittent they are also peaky. There will be times when they are maxing out and demand is low

(graph - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power Note the graph is the total wind energy and frequency of occurrence at different wind speeds. The throughput is calculated through an imaginary 100 meter disk. Energy data recorded 2002 Lee Ranch facility USA)

If you take out this brief peak period and concentrate on their output over the majority of the year, we find that the 300 day average output of these things falls to:

365/300 * 0.575/2 = 0.35 MW per turbine.

That is 1.4MW for the whole 4 turbine farm.

So most of the time they can provide only an average “home” load for 2300 homes.

But do not forget that is the averaged household demand NOT the day to day demand which is itself peaky though predictable. During many defined periods of the day the average homes will use 2+ KW.

During these times these things, on average over the 300 days, then can only provide for about 600 "homes".

The ability of wind turbines to provide reliable energy for “homes” is overstated, deceptive and fuelled by massive amount of wishful thinking.

I often use the old now redundant small nuclear station up the road from me in Winfrith as a comparison for Wind Energy.

This old nuclear station regularly and routinely provided 62MW to the national Grid. No peaking, no troughs, It never stopped because of the weather.

If you do the maths in the same way the wind industry does, ( i.e. “homes”), this old reliable nuclear reactor provided power for well over one hundred thousand “homes”.


Of course the other big con in all this "homes" nonsense is that household electricity is only 30% of the total demand. The rest is split across industry and services.

So why are we building these useless wind farms? Why are we desecrating our country-side?

Unless you are getting the subsidies, the reasons appear unclear.

Steaming into a Crisis

Today I took an elderly relative down to the local railway station to watch an old restored steam train pass by as it pulled a few hundred enthusiasts on a journey to London.

I am not really into steam but I must admit that these trains do make a evocative and picturesque sight (and hey, a family outing is always welcome!)

After the lumbering monster had passed through, dousing us in steam and soot, the old boy turned to me and smiled.

“In ten years we are going to need all these old relics”.

Regrettably he is probably right.

He knows, I know, and I bloody well hope that you know, that in this country, within ten years, there is going to be a shortfall in electricity generation capacity of crisis levels.

All it will take will be a severe cold snap, or the Russians getting uppity about their gas or one or a number of the old decrepit run down nuclear or coal plants breaking down.

Please, whatever you do, do not be stupid enough to think that wind power is going to get us out of this hole. All the current focus on wind energy is doing is digging us in deeper.

At a time like this we need an energy minister capable of making informed, difficult and decisive decisions. But all we have is Chris Huhne.

At least he has put in motion the construction of half of the new nuclear stations we need, which is a step in the right direction. But he is still wedded to the fairy-land fantasy of using wind power to provide a significant proportion of our power.

This means is that money that really should be allocated to building generating plant (that actually works) is diverted into wind farms so the utilities operating these wind farms can cash in on the subsidies. This money ends up in the coffers and share dividends of the greedy utility companies while the looming crisis gets ever deeper.

With the subsidy, the cost of wind power (an intermittent, unreliable and ineffective power source) is actually not far off double that of other forms of generation. The huge profits to be made on wind farms is crippling re-investment in vital non wind generation plant.

If (or should I say when?) there are power cuts, it will be interesting to see how long the electrified railways can keep going.

Maybe then, our old relics will come in handy.

Steam trains to the rescue? Far fetched? Maybe.

But no more fantastical than the belief that wind power can prevent the energy gap crisis happening, let alone provide a long lasting contribution to out electricity supply.

Wind Turbines: The Subsidy

Few people realise the extent or extravagance of the subsidy given to the large corporate operators of wind turbines.

A recent article in “Private Eye” and reproduced on the DART website here displays the sheer amount of money (your money) being sloshed about.

First, a little seed capital gets slopped in the direction of the land owners.

The traditional reward of 30 pieces of silver for selling out your neighbours is somewhat less generous than what is currently on offer. Today the payment amounts to about £10,000 per turbine per year. So for four turbines, over 25 years, this amount to a cool £1 Million.

While this yearly payment has sometimes reached £17000 per turbine, it is pathetically small when compared to the money that gets funnelled in the direction of the corporate owners of these monsters.

A wind turbine, rated at 2 MW (which averaged over a year actually only produces about 0.5MW/yr) will be paid about £250,000 for the electricity produced . But on top of this there is a subsidy of £220,000. So for a 4 turbine installation, over the 25 year lease period, the operating company will get no less than £22 million in subsidy alone.

Currently, with only a fraction of the planned insanity in place, we are paying over £1 Billion a year in subsidies. (See Here)

That is a guaranteed profit. Paid for by the government. As to the true operating profit, that will be little, nothing or even negative. The operating margin on the electricity produced alone would never be sufficient to finance these turbines.

Truly, the apple on the tree is the subsidy.

The emphasis will not be on producing useful electricity. The emphasis will be on maximising the amount of electricity produced irrespective of whether it is needed or not.

Electricity generated at 3 am (when nobody wants it) gets the same subsidy as electricity generated during peak times. So do not expect the operators to be doing their maintenance other than 9-5. If a turbine breaks down in winter when wind speeds are low, do not expect it to be repaired in a hurry. The chances of noisy turbines ever being replaced with quieter, less environmentally unfriendly versions is nil.

In real power stations the maintenance and repair schedules are ruthlessly based around getting generation back on line to support periods of maximum use. Do not expect this from wind turbine operators, there is no incentive.

For the luxury of feeling “Green” we are actually fuelling inefficient power generation and rip-off electricity utilities. The stupidity of those who queue up to support the likes of Aon, NPower, Centrica and Scottish & Southern beggars belief.

But truly the real evil in all this is the foolish concept that we can force our way to a greener environment by simply throwing money at a technology that has already proven that it is simply not up to the job.