The wear and tear on offshore wind farms means that within a decade the British will have to pay tens of billions of pounds to replace them.
According to the article author, by far the most delusional element in the Government’s energy policy is how it subordinates all else to an obsession with building thousands of hopelessly inefficient and absurdly oversubsidised windmills. This is now only made worse by George Osborne’s bid to transfer a fraction of the 100 per cent subsidy paid to those increasingly unpopular onshore wind farms to the giant offshore wind farms, which already receive a 200 per cent subsidy, making such electricity they produce six times more expensive than that we get from coal.
A year ago, a report for the Renewable Energy Foundation by Prof Gordon Hughes, a former senior energy adviser to the World Bank, was published.
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.
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