Godfrey Bloom

As I and my colleagues in UKIP have to remind people, the wind doesn’t always blow. Today is a beautiful early spring day in Yorkshire. It’s crisp, fresh, and clear, with a few clouds, but big blue skies. And very little wind.

It shouldn’t need pointing out. But it does. Again, and again, and again. When the wind doesn’t blow, wind farms do not produce any electricity.

So even if we built a million wind farms, when there is no wind, there will be no electricity. A million times nothing is nothing.

When the wind doesn’t blow... When there is no electricity... down will come baby, cradle and all. Electricity is the blood of today’s world. It does the work of many million men, it cares for the infirm, it seals us from the elements, and it moves the immobile.

Of course, not even the wind-bags are quite so stupid as to have forgotten this completely. They know that for every wind farm that has been built, we still need conventional generating capacity. But this is expensive.

Look at it this way. You have to pay for the wind farm to be built, once. And you have to pay for its backup system to be built so that you don’t have a power shortage when there’s no wind, once.

But we pay more than twice. It costs more to produce electricity from wind power than to produce it using conventional methods, coal, oil, gas, nuclear. So in order to make wind power a viable commercial enterprise, the government requires that energy suppliers (the people you pay your bill to) buy a proportion of the energy they supply to you from “rewable” suppliers (the people who actually generate the electricity). This legislation is called the “renewables obligation”. Generous subsidies are also available to wind farm operators. Plus, we still have to pay for the maintenance of the backup system too, even though it is not doing anything, when the wind is blowing. We pay for all of this through taxes and higher, and higher and higher and rising bills.

If you have just started a family, do not expect your bills to stop rising before your children have left home, finished university and got jobs... If there any jobs available, of course. That is the reality of the absurd policies that the government have committed us to.

Back to wind farms.

Each turbine in a wind farm is only capable of producing so much electricity. This is known as its “installed capacity”, and it is measured in watts. The bigger the turbine, generally, the more electricity – watts – it is capable of producing.

There is also an optimum wind speed for any turbine. This is the speed that the wind needs to be moving at, in order to produce the maximum output. For example, imagine a light bulb attached to a treadmill. If you don’t run, the light won’t shine. The faster you run, the brighter the bulb will burn. If you run too fast, you may blow the bulb. You have to run at the right speed. So it is with a wind turbine.

My colleagues and I have argued it like this, “wind farms are only productive around 30 per cent of the time”.

The British Wind Energy Association – big fans of windpower, as you might imagine – have taken issue with this. They say that it is a myth.

Myth: Wind farms are inefficient and only work 30% of the time Fact: A modern wind turbine produces electricity 70-85% of the time, but it generates different outputs depending on the wind speed. Over the course of a year, it will typically generate about 30% of the theoretical maximum output. This is known as its load factor. The load factor of conventional power stations is on average 50%. A modern wind turbine will generate enough to meet the electricity demands of more than a thousand homes over the course of a year. http://www.bwea.com/energy/myths.html

There is no “myth” about the 30% figure. What they’re trying to say is that the wind blows more than 30% of the time. This is splitting hairs.

It’s the difference between walking at a normal speed to get to a place and running twice as fast to the same place in half as much time. You cover the same ground, no matter how fast you move.

So we could have said “the wind only blows 60 percent of the time and only half as fast as we need it to”. It would have meant the same thing.

In fact, the way we’ve said it is the most general possible way of explaining how useful wind farms are. If we thought wind farms only worked 30% of the time, we’d know that we only have to make up the 70% some other way. It would be that simple.

But if there is no wind – as happens from time to time – 100% of their installed capacity must be generated in a normal way. For every wind farm that you build, you need to build an equivalently-powered power station.

So it makes no difference whatsoever what the load factor of wind farms is – 30, 40, 50, 60 percent – you still need to match conventional for wind.

The BWEA have tried to make it look like wind farms are only a little less productive than conventional power stations by saying “The load factor of conventional power stations is on average 50%.” This may be true, but it’s true for a very different reason. Wind farms only produce electricity when the wind blows. Power stations produce energy when there’s demand for it. The demand increases and decreases throughout the day. So power stations, on average, only operate at 50% of their possible output, only because we don’t need them to operate at full power.

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