Tilting at Windmills
Goodness knows what Don Quixote would have made of the march of thousands of windmills across our countryside!
The unbelievable waste of our money, in order to achieve negligible impact on our carbon footprint, boggles the mind.
The laudable objective is to rely on a renewable power source, rather than burning fossil fuels, to provide electricity. But the scheme, part of our commitment to our masters in the EU, is ill-conceived. The government's offshore windfarm plans involve spending some £100 billion by 2020 plus another 40 billion for connection to the National Grid. This equates to an expenditure of £5,600 for every household in the country. Invariably the figures justifying this lunacy refer to the "capacity" of the windmills, but it is now proven that offshore windmills generate only 30% of their designed capacity and onshore mills a mere 21%, because either the wind does not blow sufficiently strongly or, would you believe, the mills have to be shut down because the wind is too strong! This in turn means that alternative gas fired power stations must be built, and kept running on standby at all times in case of need, at huge additional cost, to back up the windmills.
None of this would be possible without huge subsidies which we pay for through our electricity bills. It is calculated that offshore wind farms cost about £11M per megawatt to build compared with a mere £500,000 for a modern gas-fired station, -- 22 times more expensive!
But that is not all. Our wonderful seascapes off the Isle of Wight, for instance, are under threat and vast areas of our incomparable countryside have already been desecrated by these expensive and useless monoliths. The full extent of disturbance to humans from the constant noise they generate and the danger to birds has yet to be fully determined. Agricola has just returned from a visit to San Francisco where the surrounding hills are festooned with thousands of the dreaded windmills. The sight is enough to make a strong man weep.
The farming and landowner organisations are full of advice to farmers on how to make a quick buck from the installation of windmills. Indeed most of us have been approached by one of the power generation giants. Thank God that we live in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and God forbid that we should ever suffer this plague.
Agricola
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