Alex Salmond’s wind farm delusion

Andrew Montford,Spectator
"The UK plan is to reduce carbon emissions by 34 percent by 2020 — regardless of the consequences. That’s bad enough, but the Scottish government’s bid to out-Blackadder their Westminster counterparts almost defies belief. The idea seems to be that Scotland can turn itself into a Celtic version of Denmark — the Danes generate 30% of their electricity from wind turbines. Scotland is allegedly going to generate the equivalent of 100% of electricity consumption using renewables, exporting much of this power to England.
The idea that this is a plausible future for Scotland relies on that combination of ignorance and wishful thinking that you only ever get at Holyrood. Denmark has make wind power work — after a fashion — simply because of who its neighbours are. Wind turbines works well alongside hydroelectric, so on windy days the Danes export the majority of the power they generate to Norway and Sweden, where the much larger grids can absorb the power surges. When the wind doesn’t blow, they can buy hydro power in return.
It sounds great on the surface, but it is actually an extraordinarily bad deal. The Danes pay top dollar for the hydro power they buy from Norway, but have to almost give away the surplus wind power that they generate. The Danish consumer in effect subsidises the Norwegian housewife.
What is even more remarkable is that all their spending on wind power has made almost no difference to the amount of carbon dioxide the Danes emit: their per capita emission levels are almost identical to ours. But electricity prices are a different story; the Danes pay more for their power than any other country in Europe – twice as much as us in UK. So the Scots who are worried about their fuel bills this winter really ain’t seen nothing yet."