Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Pantomime Season for Wind Farm Giants

Can there ever have been a better drafted, dafter scheme to transfer money from poor people to rich people than by subsidising wind farms to switch their turbines off. Today's Telegraph reports on just how utterly bonkers it all is. If it wasn't so unfair to the poorest, it would be quite funny.

The massively wealthy and powerful energy companies which have built wind farms in the UK will have been given about £10 million pounds in 2011 as compensation for not supplying electricity to the National Grid. This money will be paid by consumers, about 6 million of whom are in fuel poverty, having to choose whether they 'eat or heat'. Incredibly some of these 'constraint payments' amount to more than would have been paid for the electricity if it had been sold to the Grid.

I know. You think I'm joking again. You think that because I do not approve of Mid Wales, my home and the land I love being desecrated by hundreds of pylons and turbines, I am exaggerating. If only. This madness is for real - and as soon as I return to Westminster, I will be tabling Written Questions just to establish the facts in a way that everyone can see.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

how much money was spent on the iraq war to secure oil for our energy needs in the uk?

John said...

How much money are the government taking from the Solar Panel companies by halving the Feed in Tariff. Take the £10 million wind power subsidy from the energy companies and subsidise the solar power industry in this country.

JohnJ said...

The reason probably for the switch off is that the current grid is not capable of transferring the power to the places that it can be used,hence the need for new infrastructure ,pylon's etc.
To pay for Turbines being switched off is a political choice surely?
Some other daft Pantomime exploits are employing 620 people currently decommissioning Trawsfynydd nuclear station and proposed budget of £86m for 2011/12. (See BBC north west Wales 6th Dec 2010) The plant stopped producing power in 1991!!! So for the last 20 years how much tax payer's money and electricity has it consumed? This is Pantomime frolics on an epic scale.

£10 million seems peanuts compared to the UK bank bailout of £850bn: official cost of the bank bail out (and still RBS is demanding another £1.5bn in bonuses) according to The INDEPENDENT Friday 04 December 2009
The so called decommissioning of Wylfa nuclear power plant when it comes will involve Billions of Pounds for what? and guess who is paying? us the tax payers.

Glyn Davies said...

Anon - And your point is....

John - The Government does not take any money from solar companies, except through a tax on profits which applies to all of us. What it has done is reduce the amount of subsidy that consumers have to pay to new installations, so that the 4 year subsidy
budget of almost a billion will not run out in a few weeks time - stopping the solar industry stone dead.

Glyn Davies said...

JohnJ - Don't think the absence of pylons has got anything to do with it. In fact, if the 400kV line into Mid Wales had been built, the subsidy paid would have been considerably higher ! Even George Monbiot recognises that nuclear is inevitable as well as cheapest form of energy. And £10 million may be 'peanuts' to you, but not to the 5/6 million people already in fuel poverty who will have to pay it.

Anonymous said...

Ten million pounds divided by the population of the united kingdom, equals paying a few pence towards the cost.
More research into the term "fuel poverty" please before using it as a tactic to gain support for a flawed argument.

JohnJ said...

Glyn,
I am not a member of the Green Party or the green agenda and myself I don't know what effect rising CO2 levels will have,but you cannot avoid the fact that they are rising.
George Monbiot , its interesting you mention him didn't know much about him until I goggled him just now. Just listened to him on you tube " Interview with George Monbiot pt 4 1 May 2007" in it he said "I don't think we are going to see another Chernobyl again" need we say any more! Some commentators are saying Fukushima is 10 times worse than Chernobyl, time will tell.
This is just in "Diseased seals in Alaska tested for radiation" Reuters, Dec. 27,2011
My point regarding the pylons is, the grid does not yet have the carrying capacity to enable the power to be transferred to where it is needed it has
bottlenecks,like the bottlenecks in the Newtown traffic system. When the Grid has better links i.e. with Europe the UK will be able to export the surplus and hence income from it.(More income for the Tax Man)
You say Nuclear cheapest form of energy...please read this from The Guardian 17th March 2011 "Wind Power cheaper than nuclear" That's even Offshore Wind http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/mar/17/wind-cheaper-nuclear-eu-climate

Regarding peanuts what about giving the 5/6 million in fuel poverty some of the tax collected from road fuel. I understand we pay over 60% tax per litre how just is that?
Anyway all the best for speaking against assisted suicide I'm with you one that one all the way.

Glyn Davies said...

Anon - I think the formal definition of fuel poverty is when a household has to spend more than 10% of its income on a 'reasonable' level of warmth. Various bodies assess the level of fuel poverty and it has risen rapidly over recent years as the price of energy has risen. Current assessments vary, but are all around 6 million. If you've anything more definite, I'd welcome it.

Anonymous said...

The issue of wind turbines being switched off at times of low demand has been forgotten in the rush to push a 400kv interconnector into mid Wales from England. The common sense approach would be to link the array of wind farms in mid Wales up to the already existing pump storage grid in the North (Stwlan and Denorwig). This has already been done in Argyll in Scotland with the wind farm mini-lattice around Loch Awe pump storage. This is not even being considered in Wales due to the fractured nature of grid and wind energy planning. It appears that Wales is being used as a big power station for exports to England, regardless of the inefficiencies. It's now time to devolve all energy policy to Wales so these low impact lattices can be introduced as they have in Scotland.