What’s Really Happening With Wind Power

Researching the new novel, I had to look at the current state of UK’s electricity generation, because one of the main characters is building windmills.  ‘Energy’ is an industry I worked in back in the Eighties and Nineties.  I am well out of date, but once I’d read some of the research and the statistics, it all began to strike me that UK investment in the last twenty years has been either non-existent, or inept, or both.  Take the case of wind power, which seems to be the government’s current hope of a ‘renewable’ future.

We currently have 4,500 wind turbines in the UK.  On average they produce less than 3% of what we need.  That doesn’t sound like a lot, but of course, it’s more on a windy day.  Trouble is the wind doesn’t always blow, but we’ll come back to that in a moment.

The real motivation behind building lots of wind turbines is this: the EU is telling the UK  to produce 15% of its energy from ‘renewables’ by 2020, and that’s them being lenient because they’re asking everyone else to get to 20%.  Somehow, the UK got a lower target for being slow learners in the past.  How are we going to improve?  We have to invest in something… just to show willing.  Wind turbines are big.  No one can deny that you look like you’re doing something serious when you put up a wind turbine, but do the numbers work?

Now, I’m not going to be radical enough to say that they don’t make a contribution or help to hold back the dark day when we run out of electricity because all the fossil fuels are gone and we’re too scared to build nuclear power plants, but just how realistic is it to think of wind power as part of the ‘main’ strategy?

By simple arithmetic, to go from 3% to 15% in five years as the EU suggests, you have to build at least 22,500 turbines, even assuming you can find places to build them that are as windy as the places you already chose as being the best spots to put the first lot. Given that there are less than one hundred square miles of land in the UK, even with Scotland still attached – thank you, Alex Salmond – we now need one turbine for every four square miles, which means everyone will be on average about 1.4 miles away from their nearest tower  (I still remember my secondary school trigonometry).  Statistically that isn’t quite as close as your proximity to the nearest rat or other household vermin, but wind turbines are rather bigger.  I reckon, on a clear day, we’ll all see twenty or thirty of them from our upstairs windows… only we won’t because getting the first 4,500 built has taken sixty years; planning permission is such a bugger.

Now, on the upside, if Global Warming really kicks in and the weather gets choppy, we might not need so many. On the downside, having so much of your energy subject to barometric pressure patterns is difficult to manage. It’s a bit inconvenient to have to ration hot water when the wind doesn’t blow.  We have to consider building a lot of energy storage that we haven’t yet thought about.

Currently the UK has storage for about thirty gigawatt-hours of energy. If the wind doesn’t blow for a couple of days, we’re going to need about two hundred and fifty. We don’t know how to store that much energy, because battery technology isn’t up to it quite yet  (making batteries is also a horribly un-green manufacturing process that pollutes the planet with toxic chemicals), so what we do right now is pump water up mountains to store energy.  Once it’s stored, you need an equal amount of hydroelectric generation capacity to get it back down and turn it into electricity, which – oops! – we haven’t got.  We also don’t have enough spare mountains to build what we need.   It’s also worth saying that hydroelectric power is the most un-green generation technology on the planet, and the one with the worst record of industrial accidents and the highest death toll per gigawatt-hour.   People living under mountains should beware!

OK, so if not wind power and not hydroelectric, then what do we do?  Fossil fuels are running out and even if they weren’t, their use is dooming the planet.  We could consider burning biomass, but we can’t grow it fast enough without seriously hitting food production, the demand for which we already can’t meet because no one will let us boost yields using GM crops. Nuclear fusion doesn’t work yet. Wave power is a joke. The sun doesn’t shine hard enough or long enough, and anyway, most solar cells produce barely more energy than they take to manufacture. Leaving nuclear as the least worst option, but that’s going to leak and give us all cancer.  I’ve had cancer; it wasn’t pleasant.  If you were expecting a happy ending, there isn’t one.