Wind turbines policy is all at sea

Christopher Booker,Telegraph
" Using official data from the UK and Denmark, Prof Hughes showed that we have now been building turbines long enough to see that, due to wear and tear on their mechanisms and blades, the amount of electricity they generate very dramatically falls over the years; so that a turbine that initially produces on average at 25 per cent of its “capacity” can degrade over 15 years to produce less than 5 per cent. With offshore turbines, the effects of weather and salt corrosion are so damaging that output falls from 45 per cent to barely 12 per cent. This means, as Prof Hughes observes, that either we will have to build many more turbines than the Government is allowing for, to comply with our EU requirement to generate 32 per cent of our electricity from renewables by 2020; or, within a decade, we will have to pay tens of billions of pounds more for most of those turbines to be replaced. I gather that Prof Hughes showed his research to David MacKay, the chief scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, who could not dispute his findings. So DECC is fully aware of this devastating flaw in its projections, but presses on with its insane policy regardless."