The Conservative Government have announced that they will make it easier for landowners and investors to obtain planning permission for On-Shore Wind Turbines. This reverses previous promises to stop the installation of these environmentally destructive, unreliable and highly subsidized sources of energy.

Today (12^th December at 10.40am), one of the coldest days of the year the total output of all the Wind Turbines (on-shore and off-shore) is only 1.2GW when the electricity demand is 44GW. Gas and Nuclear is providing 70% of the requirement whilst wind is only providing 3% (source gridwatch.co.uk).

The reason for this is clear, on uniformly cold and hot days there is little atmospheric pressure change and so no wind. This is why wind turbines cannot provide a reliable power source.

The Government and the lobby groups will try to persuade us that this change of policy will bring down electricity costs. ‘It will not since the wholesale price is linked to the price of gas’ (Dr Bratby, CPRE).

There is also a proposal to give an ‘incentive’ to residents who permit new turbines in their area by proving cheaper electricity to them. But will this ‘incentive’ compensate them for the well documented reduction in their property values that will result?

If we are to have a reliable electricity supply we must have power stations that can provide power on demand when required. This can be done and at low CO2 emissions for example by gas fired stations with Carbon Capture.

Under the pressure from lobby groups the government has once again taken the wrong decision as this and previous administrations have done, which is why our electricity supply is close to breakdown and likely to be unable to meet the growing demand.