4,000 windmills produce no more than one proper power station

Christopher Booker,Telegraph
"Considering that the Government wants us to spend £100 billion on building thousands more wind turbines as the centre of its energy policy, it is rather important to know just how much value we are getting for our money. ...... Despite costing us billions, all those wind farms combined produced on average only 2.2GW: no more than a single coal-fired power plant. And for that we paid their developers £1.3 billion in subsidies through our energy bills, equating to £58 for every household in the land.
The world’s largest offshore wind farm, the London Array in the Thames estuary, opened last summer by David Cameron, cost £2.2 billion to build, to generate on average – thanks to the wind’s intermittency – just 200 megawatts (MW), for which we pay £175 million a year in subsidies. Meanwhile Europe’s largest gas-fired power station, opened in 2012 at Pembroke, cost £1 billion, to produce 2,000MW or 10 times as much – without a penny of subsidy. In other words, it can generate almost as much power as all the wind farms put together, at less than half the price, even allowing for the cost of the gas. And, unlike them, it can do so reliably, whenever it is needed. Slowly, we are waking up to the fact that wind turbines are by far the most inefficient, expensive and unreliable means of generating electricity ever devised. And that to centre our entire national energy policy on building 10,000 more of them in the next six years is one of the most dangerous political follies in Britain’s history."