Offshore wind is not more ‘value for money’ than onshore
Joe Wright, 4 December 2013
The government has finally capitulated to the long and drawn-out campaign against onshore wind farms, informing the BBC this morning that part of the subsidies for onshore wind farms and solar energy will be switched to offshore wind farms. What began as a campaign brimming with nimby-ism, with increasing pressure from constituents on Tory MPs and mounting fear of the purchase of UKIP’s complete opposition to wind farms, has evolved into complete banana-ism – ‘Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything!’ (or Anyone).
Even US tycoon Donald Trump has waded into the furore with a court battle to halt the building of turbines off the coast near his Scotland hotel and golf course. This is in part because the flicker of the turbines’ blade shadows can ‘cause illness and distress’. The same nimby-istic campaign effects shale gas, as we discovered with Lord Howell’s remarks that fracking should be confined to the ‘desolate north’ to save Britain’s greener southern lands. But green or not, a domestic energy supply needs to be created somewhere in the UK.
While the debate over where to stick the ‘eye-saws’ has been partially quelled for now, there remains the problem of cost. On the Today Show this morning, Danny Alexander claimed the switch was based on ‘value for money’, and could allow an extra 10 gigawatts of energy by 2020. He also claimed that the overall budget for renewable energy would remain the same. Offshore turbines, however, cost more (indeed are the most expensive form of renewable energy), which is why our onshore capacity of wind farms is nearly double that of offshore – 6,772 MW compared to 3,653 MW – despite onshore being so unpopular. By switching support to offshore we will get fewer turbines (or less green energy capacity) for our buck. Offshore wind farms require subsidies at about three times the market price of power.
Banana-ism has a cost – a particularly unwelcome cost at a time when energy prices are on the up, and the government continually proclaims it is ‘tackling the deficit’. This is a rather unpalatable message but one the government should stop trying to duck. A more accurate blog tittle may have been ‘Offshore wind is not more ‘value for money’ than onshore – unless you’re happy to pay not to look at them’.
The developed world trying to reduce carbon emissions is utterly pointless because the developing world is set to vastly increase their emissions.
At the most generous estimate there are presently a billion people living in the developed world and six billion in the developing world. If the six billion only were only to produce no more than half as as much carbon per head as the developed world does now (an absurdly optimistic forecast), carbon emissions will greatly increase beyond the point where the warmists claim disaster will occur even if the developed world halved its emissions,. Hence, it is pointless for the developed world to reduce their emissions. All the developed world is doing is hamstringing their own industry by adopting so-called green measures.
There is also a strange silence on methane emissions. Could this be because so much of the methane comes from natural wetlands and paddy fields in the undeveloped world?
These two essays expand on the pointlessness of the industrialised world reducing emissions and the essentially religious nature of the warmists:
http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/population-the-elephant-in-the-global-warming-green-room/
http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/man-made-global-warming-is-the-21st-century-phlogiston/
If only everyone could see through the warmist fog and realize that ‘Global Warming’ or should I say ‘Climate Change’ is the biggest scam the world has ever seen, and is costing us more than we will ever know.