Wind energy – the future or a blot on the landscape, Wexford Soapbox 8th November, 2010

Tomorrow I travel to Brussels with Monica as a guest of Nessa Childers MEP to visit the European Parliament. This is a prize for placing second in Wexford Soapbox 3 years ago. This was my speech. The content is still relevant.

Windmills are great machines – for decapitating migrating swans and transferring money from electricity customers to investors and land owners.  But, ladies and gentlemen, they are bad machines for generating electricity.  A recent study showed that the UK installed wind capacity of 4 gigawatts generated on average just 368 MW in 2009, or 9.2%.  And this power is only generated when the wind blows at the right speed.  So in addition to the 4GW of wind capacity you also have to have 4GW of conventional power stations that can be turned on on demand when the wind does not blow.  These power stations are much more costly and inefficient than conventional base power stations that generate 24/7.  So you may actually use MORE fossil fuel if you have a large amount of wind generating capacity than if you had only fossil fuel stations.  Large scale wind generation will not be feasible until cost effective electricity storage is developed.

We embarked on this foolish path to build windmills without electricity storage because of a belief in anthropomorphic (man made) global warming or climate change.  This belief, held with a religious fervour by environmentalists, many NGO’s, and some scientists, is that carbon dioxide, a plant fertiliser emitted to the atmosphere when we breath or burn coal is going to cause catastrophic warming of the Earth.  This belief is then exploited by other scientists and politicians to harvest research money and carbon taxes.  Like the Lisbon treaty nearly 100% of politicians unquestioningly support this belief while many of the public are sceptical.  The Dáil committee on climate change never hears the other side.  Climate change is supported as fervently by Simon ‘only electric cars in 2020’ Coveney and Liz ‘Wear a coat indoors if you’re cold’ McManus as it is by the government parties. 

However, it is now clear that climate change is not the big bogey sold by alarmists.  The release of emails last November know as climategate, errors in reports from the UN panel on climate change, a cold winter and a steady stream of sceptical evidence has caused a major decline in public concern.  But it will leave a costly legacy – carbon taxes and alternative energy subsidies will not be quickly reversed by politicians who will not wish to show how gullible they were. And Windmills on the hill tops - giant revolving 3 pronged crosses will remain on the hills for years as monuments to the folly of warmism, with bird sacrifices to the green Earth god littered at their feet.