Wind turbines make no sense

Not only do wind farms provide expensive energy, they can be pretty unpopular. At least one in six wind farms have led to complaints about noise causing a lack of sleep or just being "dreadfully irritating".

At one wind farm the company switch off the turbines when they turn in a certain direction, in order to keep the noise down! Yet there are still complaints about noise ("like a train that never arrives or a helicopter landing outside"), and campaigners are gathering evidence on the noise problems caused by wind farms to pressure the government to take action.

As Booker, North and others have repeatedly explained, wind power is highly intermittent. Now Aggreko looks at Ireland's 900 megawatts of installed capacity. In the first quarter of last year, there were 12 occasions when power output varied by more than 100 megawatts within 15 minutes, and 76 occasions when that happened within 30 minutes.

Peak output was 940 megawatts - but when the wind drops, it's down to nine megawatts. That's one percent of installed capacity.

And in winter, the wind drops most when it gets coldest, and demand is highest - as indeed, it's been doing this winter as well.

So the economics get even worse. There needs to be full back-up power, available at the touch of a button, to cover 100% of peak demand. 

This is the economics of the madhouse. Which hasn't stopped the government. It plans to spend billions of pounds of taxpayers' money encouraging developers to erect around 1,000 new onshore turbines over the next ten years.