It’s Chris Huhne again. Here is his message to the Offshore Wind Conference in Liverpool last week, organised by Renewable UK, p.k.a. the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA).
Says Huhne, “Both the Prime Minister and I stated quite categorically that we will be the greenest government ever.”
It doesn’t matter if you voted blue, or if you voted yellow. You’re getting green. Even if you only voted blue and yellow to get rid of red, you’re getting green. It doesn’t matter what you want. It doesn’t matter what the public wants. The policies of the government that the public wanted to get rid of have been taken up by Huhne and his colleagues in the Con-Dem coalition.
The reason Huhne gives for this is that “We need a low-carbon economic recovery to tackle the challenges of climate change and energy security”.
Yet the climate change story is – at least as far as almost everyone else is concerned – disintegrating. Even those who remain attached to climate politics are acknowledging that the alarm and fear generated in the debate has been much exaggerated and poorly-founded. Yet Huhne is promising “the greenest government ever”. It is hard not to smell a rat when senior politicians present such doublethink. What is going on?
The rest of Huhne’s speech is assurance after assurance that wind energy manufacturers and producers will be able to cash in on the policies created by Cameron, Clegg and Huhne’s “greenest government ever”.
There are renewable energy targets; there are incentives, breaks, and subsidies. And there are contracts. There is £200 billion on the table.
As for “energy security”, Huhne is backing the least competitive form of electricity production with your money. He wants to be a world leader in the last technology anyone wants. Wind was technology in the dark ages. It was abandoned when we discovered how to find, extract and use coal, oil, and gas, and when we discovered how to split the atom. We might yet discover how to create fuels through biotechnology and through fusion. There are still terrific advances to be made by science, yet Huhne opts for the obsolete technology. And behind his desire for obsolete technology is his obsolete politics. It is not you or I Huhne believes he needs to win over; it is the producers of this energy themselves that need to be convinced. In order to convince them, he offers them cash incentives.
First prize goes to Siemens Windpower. Huhne has just written them a cheque for a cool £5 million in order to help them create a 6 megawatt wind turbine. In 2009, Siemens generated nearly €21 billion profit. Its energy sector created €26 billion of revenue, more than €3 billion of which was profit. Why then, would they need Huhne’s £5 million, if wind really were viable? Why aren’t they leaping at the “opportunity” and need instead to be bribed, and promised subsidies, grants, deals?
The other beneficiaries of Huhne’s generosity with your money announced this week are as follows. JDR Cable Systems Ltd from Hartlepool get a £2 million grant to develop cables to carry the ludicrously expensive electricity back to our shores. Converteam from Rugby will enjoy a £1 million grant to develop “Large scale DC conversion technology”. NGentec from Edinburgh will receive £800,000. Cooper Rolling Bearings get £256,250; South Boats Special Projects Ltd get £300,000; MTL Group £250,000; and Blade Dynamics of the Isle of Wight – the place where wind-energy firm, Vestas couldn’t sustain themselves – gets £400,000.
The £10 million is the prize awarded by the government in a competition it has set up to hasten the development of cheaper wind energy. It might be said that it is not a huge amount seen next to the millions and billions that the government wastes on all sorts of things. But this £10million is just a small part of the billions it spends and billions more that it plans to spend on wind energy – a technology that Chris Huhne has admitted can barely compete with conventional sources of energy, even during a time of historically high fuel prices - through subsidies, grants, and other giveaways.
Britain is facing an energy crisis, on top of its economic problems. Chris Huhne and his colleagues are hoping that something magical will be blown in by the wind. They are living in a fantasy world, in which ‘the greenest government ever’ simply powers homes, businesses, and the economy by tapping in to nature’s bounty. However, they were appointed to run the affairs of a country which is unfortunately subject to the laws of material reality. The government’s preoccupation with ‘renewables’ invites more problems and far more cost than is necessary. Just as with Ed Miliband before him, Huhne seems determined to make a name for himself as the man who fulfilled something impossible, making Britain green and prosperous.
Wouldn’t it be better if they just got on with the job, rather than their own daydreams?
In my previous post, I referred to a video of Chris Huhne at ‘Wind Week’, organised by the fake grass-roots campaign, Embrace, which are directed and funded by RenewableUK – the rebranded British Wind Energy Association (BWEA). The BWEA are on a PR offensive, and are recruiting ‘ordinary people’ to do their lobbying for them. Being so fat and bloated on subsidies, they have immobilised themselves, and have to get other people to do their bidding, passed off as ‘campaigning’ to ‘save the planet’.
Anyway, this is what Huhne has to say for himself.
Huhne begins...
This is a very windy country so we have a fantastic amount of resource in wind energy and we can potentially produce enough electricity to fuel 33 million homes.
This is quite a claim. According to BWEA – so take the figure with a pinch of salt – 2906 wind turbines installed in the UK was sufficient to power 2,559,247 homes. In other words, the average turbine produced sufficient energy for 880 homes. So to produce sufficient energy for 33 million homes, we’d need to build 37,500 wind turbines. This small country of ours occupies an area of just 94,060 square miles. To realise Huhne’s absurd vision would mean building a wind turbine on every single 2.5 square miles across the entire United Kingdom.
Huhne’s distance from reality increases...
Now we've only got 24 million homes, so this is a real prospect of us becoming a net energy exporter again, as we were at the peak of North Sea oil and gas.
Huhne seems to think that there is a real possibility of us exporting surplus energy from wind. All we need to do is build another 34,000 wind turbines. Simple.
Even if such a hugely expensive and pointless exercise were possible, Huhne has forgotten that those 2906 were only effectively supplying power at around 28% of the time. When the wind wasn’t blowing, energy to each of those 2,559,247 homes came from some other source, coal, oil, gas, or nuclear. So on top of paying for wind turbines, we’d still need to build conventional power stations. Any benefit that we’d realise from exporting wind energy would be swallowed up by keeping a second electricity generating network on standby, in case the wind dropped.
It's a phenomenal resource, and we need to use it. We're surrounded as an island by tides, by waves, and we have wind, and we unfortunately don't have a lot of sunshine. So solar energy is not going to be our strong point. We have to work on the other renewables.
We have to work on the other renewables? Why do we have to? The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change wants us to tell us that we have no alternative. We must do as he says. This is not a subject for debate. Once again, the undemocratic reality of the UK government’s climate policies is exposed. It is as if Huhne is in hock to the wind energy industry, and we’re to pay without ever being asked for our views. To make this outright thievery look like a popular and progressive measure, the BWEA/RenewableUK has organised its very own paramilitary wing – Embrace – to parade in the street.
More nonsense from Huhne...
We are the world leader in offshore wind. And what is particularly interesting is that the cost of wind energy is coming down and down. On shore wind is now competitive with all of the conventional energy sources. We're going to see the same thing happen over time with off-shore wind.
It is a massive disappointment to hear a senior British politician speaking with such pride about our ‘world-leadership’ in an industry which is so completely uncompetitive. It’s a bit like coming first in a hit-yourself-with-a-hammer competition. Yes, Huhne is happy because he’s winning the competition to see who can be the biggest idiot.
If it really were true that wind was competitive, then why would it need subsidies? Wind farm operators currently get around 40% of the £billion subsidies handed out by the government each year, from your bill. This money effectively guarantees profits for the people putting up wind farms in areas where they simply are not wanted.
Huhne concludes, with perhaps the limpest possible defence of his policy.
I think Wind Week is a very good initiative because it sensitises people... lots of myths about wind turbines... When I put a wind turbine on my house in er in in in er Eastleigh, you know, the neighbours were worried, is it going to be very noisy. Well it's not noisy at all. And you know, is it going to mash up all the birds. No, it's not going to mash up all the birds. Does it actually look that bad? No it doesn't. So I think when people get more familiar with the technology and they realise how friendly it is by comparison with many of the other ways we traditionally generate electricity, I think they will warm to it, and I hope that it becomes easier to get the roll-out which can actually take advantage of this enormous resource that we've got.
Huhne seems to think that we just need to be gently persuaded into accepting windfarms. He seems to think that whatever our objections, we can be nudged and sweet-talked by pretend activists at fake grassroots organisations into thinking that they are a great new idea. He seems to think that our objections can be gently swept aside by getting pretend activists to make enthusiasm for wind the social norm. He thinks we’ll be convinced by his own wind turbine at his constituency home – in a place he can’t even remember the name of – and he thinks we’ll be convinced by what he says his neighbours say about whatever it is he has attached to his house. He is mistaken.
Huhne represents a peculiar phenomenon of our times – democratically elected (just about) politicians seem to think that the views of those who elected them don’t really count for much. Virtually nobody votes for the Green Party or green policies, and opinion polls time and time again demonstrate that the public simply aren’t interested in the climate agenda or that they don't really give a stuff about expensive, inefficient, and unreliable renewable energy. Yet once elected, Huhne and his ilk seem to take it upon themselves to set about persuading us that we must accept the green agenda – as though that was what people had voted for them to do.
A year ago, climate sceptics seemed to be fighting a losing battle. Then along came Climategate. Then COP15 failed. Then Glaciergate. The scandals emerging from climate alarmist circles are now hard to keep up with. We’re all sceptics now. Except of course, for the new UK government, who seem committed to this stupid idea of putting up wind farms where they are not wanted.
Chris Huhne of the Liberal Democrats is the Con-Dem coalition’s Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, and replaces Ed Miliband, who was also a fan of wind. Here is Huhne, banging on about how great wind is at an event in Leicester Square.
I’ll return to Huhne’s silly little speech in the next post. What interests me now is the circumstances of that piece to camera. The event Huhne is speaking at is part of “Wind Week”, organised by “Embrace My Planet”, whose website proclaims them to be the “campaign to support renewables”. It goes on,
Embrace my planet is a movement of ordinary people who are supporting renewable energy in the UK, enabling you to make your opinions known to politicians and the media.
Now, fair’s fair, we mustn’t grumble when people – ordinary people, remember – we disagree with organise themselves to campaign for whatever it is they would like to see more of. Healthy debate is one of the few remaining British institutions that is capable of providing some resistance to climate nonsense. For instance, I was pleased when recently, my colleague Lord Monckton and Lord Lawson together won the motion This house would put economic growth before combating climate change at the Oxford Union. However, can you imagine the debating chambers of Westminster pondering such a direct and well-formulated question? The UK and EU are already committed to putting climate change before all else, including democracy.
Embrace is an arms-length campaign of RenewableUK (formerly BWEA), the trade association for renewable energy suppliers in Britain. While it is sponsored by companies, the campaign itself is activist-led - Embrace provides the facilities for renewable energy supporters to campaign directly to their elected representatives, as well as organise campaigning events for themselves.
RenewableUK, formerly the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA), seem to have been embarrassed about their association with wind, and changed it. ‘Wind’ has become such an embarrassment that now they use the much more benign-sounding ‘renewable’. But it’s still the BWEA, in fancy dress. This is a PR war.
And just as ‘renewables’ turned out to mean, in fact, ‘wind’, what was claimed as ‘a movement of ordinary people’ was in fact a lobbying organisation for wind farm companies. These companies who make fat profits from subsidies are pretending to be a grass-roots organisation. They pass themselves off as citizens to lobby for government action favourable to wind farm operators and installers. This enables them to continue to profit from subsidies. This is a scam. Of course it is.
Imagine a big oil company had set up a similar organisation. Imagine, for instance, BP were to set up some kind of organisation of ‘ordinary people’ to change the public’s perception of its image. Imagine – just for example – that It had been accused of despoiling the environment, and so in response, it set up and financed an organisation which it populated with ‘citizens’ and other ‘ordinary people’ to lobby on its behalf in the USA. There would be an outcry. The ‘activists’ that would work with this organisation would be accused of dishonesty. Nobody would take their claim to being ‘ordinary people’ seriously, and it would be all too obvious that what they were doing they were doing for extraordinary reasons.
So why is it so different when wind companies want to spoil the environment?
The winds of change have caught the pro-wind lobby grimacing. Stuck in an ugly contorted image of its own making, it realised it needed a facelift and split to become RenewablesUK and its pretend activist/PR wing, the Embrace campaign. But behind these facades is the same old monster: bloated by subsidies, yet hungry for more. More! MORE!
