The wind swindle

Nigel Lawson's Global Warming Policy Foundation links to a Daily Mail piece by Johnny Ball, who has suddenly found himself an agw sceptic celebrity.

And Delingpole has a German travel piece. They are related. In Germany they have stationary wind turbines too.

Ball uses his space to put the costs of generating energy by wind in straightforward terms:

If it costs 2.3p to produce one unit of electricity using gas, it costs 2.5p to produce the same electricity using nuclear energy and perhaps 2.9p using coal. Using wind power, the cost is an astonishing 9.8p.

Readers who don't believe that the trace gas CO2 is going to heat human civilisation out of existence can note that

Gas-powered power stations are now twice as efficient as they were 18 years ago, while the safety record of nuclear power in Western Europe is second to none. We ought to be investing in these, not ridiculous and highly inefficient wind farms that are only being built because of the huge government subsidies and guaranteed profits that are being offered.

And gas itself will become cheaper as we start to exploit shale, shifting the balance even further away from wind.

And yet the monolithic establishment continues to force us to pay for this ugly, pointless technology.

North remarks in a different context that our parents "told the élites where to get off".

We, he says, have to learn how do the same.