Let us look, however, at what Mr Davey carefully didn’t say. For a start, of
course, because the wind only blows intermittently, his five wind farms –
covering, incidentally, 200 square miles of sea – will not provide anything
like the 3GW of power he mentions. He is playing the old trick of confusing
“capacity” with actual output. Even using implausibly generous figures from
another part of his department’s own website, we can see that the average
output of all Mr Davey’s £12 billion worth of projects would only be around
2.2GW: much the same as that of the single gas-fired power station recently
built by RWE at Pembroke for a capital cost of just £1 billion.
Because the wind is so unreliable, we would still need 3GW of power from the
fossil-fuelled power stations the Energy Secretary so hates, just to provide
back-up for when it isn’t blowing at the right speed (on Thursday, for
instance, all our 4,500 existing turbines combined were only giving us 215
megawatts, less than 0.6 per cent of what we were using). Mr Davey may
pretend that all his projects will help meet our 32 per cent EU target. But
those 2.2GW would only raise our output from renewables from 11 per cent to
15 per cent of the total, so we will still have to spend a further £40
billion before 2020. ....."
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