Wind farm veto still doesn’t get the point

To the rage of the greenies and the delight of countless thousands of local residents, the Government announced on Friday its rejection of the £3.6 billion scheme by a Franco-Dutch consortium to build a monster wind farm covering up to 76 square miles of sea between Dorset and the Isle of Wight, blocking off some of the most valued sea views in southern England.

The developers offered two versions of their scheme – one of up to 194 giant 3.5 megawatt (MW) turbines, taller than Blackpool Tower, the other of only 105 6MW turbines covering a smaller area. But at the forefront of the reasons for rejecting the project, as I reported last year, was the warning from Unesco that its scale threatened the unique status of Dorset’s “Jurassic Coast”, Britain’s only natural World Heritage site.

Our Government’s initial response, under our then-Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Davey, was that the wind farm’s impact on the scenery would only be “minimal” – while that of the developers was to say that the Unesco designation was not based on the Jurassic Coast’s views, only on its fossils.

I took a personal interest in this because, as a keen young fossil-hunter living in Dorset 65 years ago, I knew every inch of that amazingly beautiful coast. But although this was the chief reason for ministers upholding the Planning Inspectorate’s call for the scheme to be scrapped, there were other, more practical grounds for rejection which they could not admit to because they go to the heart of our crazy energy policy.

The only reason why those foreign firms were attracted to “Navitus Bay” (a name no one had heard of until they invented it) was the colossal subsidies that the Government gives to offshore wind farms, which would have earned them £430 million a year – more than two thirds of it in subsidies paid through our electricity bills.

Although the developers played their usual trick of boasting that their wind farm could have generated 970MW, its actual output, due to the wind’s intermittency, would have averaged only 320MW. Compare that with the gas-fired power station recently built in Pembroke for £1 billion, less than a third of the cost of Navitus Bay, which can reliably generate more than six times as much electricity, 2,000MW or 2 gigawatts (GW), without a penny in subsidy, and costing us all less than a third as much.

In practical terms, Navitus Bay would have been a ludicrous waste of money for its relatively small amount of intermittent power; quite apart from the immense environmental havoc it would have wreaked, including a 22-mile trench for cabling to connect it to the grid, carving a scar 140ft wide across the New Forest.

But our ministers couldn’t object to any of the practical reasons for refusing the scheme, because offshore wind is at the centre of their drive to “decarbonise” our electricity, and the much cheaper gas-fired plants are of course powered by those dreadful, “polluting” fossil fuels they want to eliminate.

How ironic it was that the rejection of Navitus Bay should have come in the same week we learnt that yet another of our fast-dwindling fleet of major coal-fired stations is to close at Eggborough in Yorkshire, taking another 2GW off the grid. Two years ago we still had 24GW of coal capacity, providing more than a third of our electricity. Since then 13 stations have been taken wholly or partly off the list, which will leave us with only 11GW.

Yet on one still day last week, when coal was still providing nearly 25 per cent of our electricity, the output of all our 5,500 wind turbines put together was just 0.6GW, or less than 1 per cent of the power we were using. Which illustrates precisely the point that those in charge of our energy policy seem incapable of understanding.

It is all very well for the wind industry to crow at those rare moments when their windmills are contributing 15 per cent or more to our needs. But how are we going to keep our lights on and our computer-dependent economy functioning if, when the wind drops, that 15 per cent falls almost to zero and the fossil-fuel power stations that might have closed the gap are all gone. The Navitus Bay decision may be welcome. But there is not yet the faintest sign of our decarbonising dreamers grasping the real lesson they should have taken from it.