A Place to Stand

A very informative letter in the Herald on Friday.

If anyone is pondering why there has been a recent upsurge in the number of small (12-15kW) windmills across the countryside, I would suggest this is driven by the recently enhanced financial subsidy rather than a desire to save the planet.

From yesterday, a new hidden subsidy called the Feed-in Tariff has been introduced which increases dramatically the hidden subsidy from around 5p per unit (kWh) to more than 26p per unit generated, regardless of whether the electricity is fed into the grid or not. This contrasts with the 12-14p per unit consumers presently pay our electricity supplier and, of course, the cost of this subsidy is added to the retail cost of electricity for all consumers.

This subsidy can be calculated to be of the order of £6,000-9,000 per year per windmill depending on capacity and the availability of wind. There are also grants and interest-free loans plus the savings in reduced electricity bills for the installer.

Saving the planet? I don’t think so.

G M Lindsay,

Absolutely right. The disgraceful thing is that this appears only in newspaper letter columns. The media have been full of puff pieces about how wonderfully windmills are helping local communities survive by shovelling money at them, here. That no questioning journalism appears in the "news2 pages &n it depends on the public to write letters on the subject to get any truth into the paper says a lot about how corrupt & obedient our media are.

And even when the public do draw their attention to the facts the media are still often going to decide to simply censor & deliberately promote the lies. Scottish Renewables, a lobby organisation for the entirely subsidy dependent windfarm industry published a letter which said that approx 25% of our power comes from renewables & that instead of wind needing back up from conventional baseload power, conventional systems need baseload back-up from wind. I wrote pointing out the facts & they didn't publish. However they did publish a gentler letter asking for evidence. They then published Scottish Renewables reply which simply repeated & extended their lie. I rewrote & sent the ubndernoted & this time they refused to publish any reply form anybody. The result is that the Herald have twice published something which they know to be a total pack of lies people working for a government supported fraud & deliberately refused even to allow replies from people they know to be telling the truth (having the references to prove it). This is not on a matter of opinion, for which there could be some excuse, but on a matter of clear & unambiguous lying about a matter of solid fact.

Once again Ms Hogan, speaking for Scottish Renewables, claims that "renewables" produce 1/4 of Scotland's power, of which 8% is wind & presumably the rest is traditional hydro. I would not wish to suggest that this represents anything other than the very highest standard of honesty to which the renewable lobby aspire. However she produces no figures & the most recently available figures Scottish Energy Study: Volume 1: Energy in Scotland: Supply and Demand, 2006 shows the total amount of renewable electricity, almost all of it hydro power, was 5.46 TWH out of 109.76, i.e. just under 5%. Since the only expansion of hydro since then has been the Glendoe project it is difficult to understand how hydro output can have increased nearly fourfold.

In her previous letter she said that wind was not only not an impractical generation method needing conventional power sources to provide the baseload but that wind should provide the baseload because conventional power was insufficiently reliable. However a previous wind spokesman for Scottish Renewables, Jason Ormiston, is on record as saying wind can be no part of baseload (in a letter in another paper explaining why wind will not be to blame when the lights go out). Again I would not wish to suggest that either assertion represents anything other than the very highest standard of honesty that we can expect from the eco-lobby but would appreciate knowing how such opposite claims can both be true.

We are facing blackouts. Energy production is a matter in which the laws of physics & indeed arithmetic rule absolutely. When 25,000 pensioners die annually from the effects of hypothermia because of fuel poverty because our electricity prices are up to 4 times what France has I consider it wicked when those seeking subsidy for their "Green" projects do not tell the truth & grossly irresponsible when the media do not discriminate in their reporting between facts & spin.

Neil Craig
200 Woodlands Rd.
Glasgow
G3 6LN
0141 332 7785
Ref the 2006 study - I simply do not believe we have built windmills producing an extra 20% of our power in the interim - if nothing else the fact that windmills work at only 28% capacity this would mean a capacity nearly equal to all our other power. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2006/01/19092748/8 fig 21

The Ormiston letter was in the Scotsman a few years ago. I can give you the date if requested - it was on the same page as a letter of mine which I have kept.

This precedent means that to the question "are there any circumstances whatsoever, under which any statement made by this paper & claimed tom be truthful or factual, can be accepted as such without overwhelming supporting evidence" the answer must be no.

To be fair there may be some newspaper claim mentioned Orwell's 1984 which shows a greater degree of dishonesty there than our media/lobbyists/government tell, but I know of none.

Incidentally this from John Brignal explains why even if it were produced & actually supplied to the grid (we electricity customers subsidise not only the windmillers who intend to feed electricity into the grid but even those who use it all themselves) it would still be worse than useless. Basically the grid managers need to have a very good idea of how much electricity they have at any moment or the grid may collapse. Again this gets censored by our free & honest media.

Labels: eco-fascism, Media, Unpublished letters