Coming soon, to a hilltop near you…

I was musing this morning on how many wind farms we should expect to see, industrialising our countryside and wild land. The information is all there on the British Wind Energy Association’s (sorry, that should be “RenewableUK’s”) own website: LINK.

“RenewableUK” is the mouthpiece and lobbying arm of the wind energy businesses and it is they who disseminate all the crap about how many thousands of homes will be powered by this and that wind farm and how many tons of CO2 each turbine will be saving.

Anyway, here’s what the information looks like. I had to shrink it down to get it all on one page. (They obviously do not want the full horror to be viewed all at once.) If you click on the image you can blow it up, just so you can check that I haven’t fiddled anything in the next bit of this post! We certainly wouldn’t want to be accused of misrepresenting the truth on this blog, unlike Renewables UK’s frequent press statements…

Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t think that that is readily digestible, is it? No, of course not. It’s not supposed to be. It’s there just so RenewablesUK can refer to it and cherry pick the information they want to shove down the appreciative (for ‘appreciative, you could also read ‘lazy’) journalists’ throats, who can’t be arsed to get off their own fat backsides and actually check the stories they are being fed by this exceedingly well funded lobbying group. Yes, the figures are all there, but what do they show and what do they mean?

We can tabulate the figures readily enough and from it produce two simple graphs that show the deeply depressing reality:

[CLICK TO ENLARGE & STUDY CAREFULLY!  Ooooh! There’ll be questions at the end of class]

For convenience’s sake, let’s assume that all the wind farms currently in planning get built (Some won’t, of course, but many more will spring up to take their place, so it’s not a bad proposal.) I won’t attempt to teach you to suck eggs, but I think there are a few things that leap out from the graphs:

• Alec Salmond is determined to produce 100% equivalent of Scotland’s electricity from renewable sources, which will be largely from wind as there is limited scope to increase hydropower. You will note that he intends to produce 11.1GW from onshore wind and less than 1.5GW from offshore wind. England has the opposite approach: Building far more at sea.
• Scotland currently has 4.5GW capacity onshore either built or under construction yet there is another 6.6GW consented and in planning. That means that Scotland can expect to see two and a half times the number of onshore wind turbines than there is presently scarring the landscape.
• Wales has 0.5GW on shore either built or being built but has a whopping 1.7GW in planning or consented. There will be over four times what is already built.
• England has 1.6GW built onshore and another 1.9GW to come. There will be over twice as many as there are now.
• N Ireland has 0.5GW built onshore but another 1.2GW to come. That’s three and a half times as many as now.

***

So, the future of our British countryside looks to be pretty ghastly really. The pro-wind lobby always say that wind farms should be “sensitively sited”. I can’t for one moment even imagine a parcel of countryside in Britain where huge clusters of turbines 410 feet tall can be sensitively sited, can you?

Personally, I think we should site them up Alec Salmond’s and Tim Yeo’s backsides.

EDIT: SUNDAY 28th OCTOBER:

These two pieces were in today’s Sunday Times:

SIX THOUSAND more turbines to blight countryside

The Sunday Times: "Drop in wind speeds a blow to energy firms"

The future is looking incredibly bleak for our countryside and these turbines are becoming even less efficient as years go by.