Over the next four years, visitors to Brighton and the Sussex coast are in for
a shock. Visible all the way from Beachy Head to the Isle of Wight, they
will see 100 or more colossal wind turbines rising up to 700ft into the sky,
nearly 200ft higher than Blackpool Tower. These will form one of the world’s
largest wind farms, covering more than 60sq miles of the English Channel.
If they wonder what purpose is served by this vast industrial installation,
last week given the go-ahead by Ed Davey, the Energy and Climate Change
Secretary, they should not be fooled by the claim of the Rampion wind farm’s
developers, the German energy giant E.on, that it will have the “capacity”
to generate 700 megawatts (MW) of electricity. Buried in small print on its
website, it admits that, thanks to the intermittency of the wind, the actual
output of this £2 billion scheme will at best average only 240MW.
To see how derisory this is, the latest gas-fired power station opened by
another German firm, RWE, at Pembroke two years ago, at only half the
capital cost, £1 billion, can reliably produce nearly 10 times as
much electricity, 2,000MW, all the time.
Of course, no one would dream of building such a gargantuan wind factory as
Rampion if it were not for Mr Davey’s ludicrous subsidy system. It may earn
E.on some £325million a year. But £220 million of that will
be subsidy, paid for by all of us through our electricity bills. Where the
power from that Pembroke plant is costing us only £50 per megawatt hour, for
that fed to the grid from Brighton we shall pay £155 per megawatt hour, more
than three times as much. ....."
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