Onshore Wind Is Stunting Other Renewables

The British Wind Energy Association, a trade lobby representing the commercial interests of wind power property developers is today claiming that wind power is “powering ahead”, and predicts that “onshore wind will deliver 50% more than previous projections, increasing to a cumulative total of at least 6,000 MW by 2010”, and will be collecting nearly half of the £1 billion a year subsidy available. This will equate to around 3,500 wind turbines across the UK some of which will be in beautiful and sensitive rural areas.

Far from being a positive achievement, REF believes that these claims show just how the renewable sector has become skewed by flaws in the renewable obligation, which offer equal rewards to all technologies in spite of their intrinsic merits. As is now well known from experience in Germany and Denmark wind power is “non-firm” and cannot close conventional power stations, as well as imposing costly burdens on the grid system.

In spite of a barrage of technical criticism from the engineering world and from the National Audit Office the UK’s well intentioned but unrefined subsidy support mechanism continues to create a ‘feeding frenzy’ for onshore wind.

The BWEA’s report confirms what critics have long been saying, namely that onshore wind is suppressing support for other much better renewable technologies such as tidal and biomass, which are capable of producing reliable power. Onshore wind isn’t the best and the cheapest, it’s just the least capital intensive method to achieve access to the subsidy.

The report also implies that windpower offshore is being equally stifled. Just months ago offshore wind was predicted to provide around half of the UK’s windpower, but now it is being edged out almost completely. Offshore wind is more capital intensive, but produces more energy per turbine because of higher wind speeds and can be brought into reasonable proximity to centres of load, such as London.

Campbell Dunford, CEO of the Renewable Energy Foundation, said: “Far from representing a valuable achievement this piece of special pleading shows all too clearly how the subsidy flood is forcing a second-rate technology at the expense of much better alternatives and at increasing costs to the consumer.”