Wind farms are a racket

The following is an extract from a learned paper on the wind farms that are disfiguring much of Europe. It makes disturbing reading. What is rarely mentioned is wind turbine interference with air traffic control radar. It tends to break up the radar 'paint' at speeds araound 200 m.p.h,more or less the approach speed of airliners and the cruising speed of general aviation planes

Wind Energy Favoured by conservationists and politicians alike, only recently has adverse publicity been observed, largely caused by high profile local pressure groups objecting to sites in their locations.  When on-shore they are visually intrusive, noisy and inefficient. When offshore they are a great deal more costly and unlikely to survive more than 10 years without major repair – and both need expensive re-cabling to bring into the National Grid, causing even more expense and visual impairment. The cost of overground pylons are about £1.6M/mile, underground about £20M/mile. Almost 3,000 wind turbines have been installed in the UK, with another 4,800 planned. UK consumers have not been informed of the huge subsidies needed, nor have the stealth taxes supporting these subsidies been revealed. A 3 Megawatt (MW) unit costs about £3-4M to build, will produce about 9,200 MW hours/a, with an annual value of £0.33M.  It also gains £0.442M through subsidy via ROCS (see EU Emissions Trading Scheme below). With the UK government providing a 20-year guaranteed subsidy, over its 25-year life the turbine attracts £20M of revenue.  This provides an explanation for the “rush-to-gold” by many entrepreneurs. If this is bad for the UK, other European countries are much worse; Germany provides a subsidy of four times cost of generation. The total cost of subsidies for wind power, producing 6.8% of the Germany’s electricity, is estimated at 20.5 billion Euros over the last decade.  This palls to irrelevance compared to the solar subsidy; 53.3 billion Euros to produce just 0.6%! Currently UK users pay an average of £12 (direct charge) + £31 (carbon permits) + £38 (carbon emissions reduction) per site. The total (£81/a) is the effective current total subsidy applying to renewable sources of power.  Further taxes are proposed up to 2020. But it gets worse. The UK government has announced 30GW of renewable-based power is to be built. Since wind generation is the only mature low carbon technology, ergo wind power becomes the only current source of renewable energy. But wind turbines are non-continuous sources, necessitating the building of 24GW of conventional power generators for backup. By coincidence the capital cost of building 30GW wind generators is approximately the same as building nuclear generators of the same capacity. Both are effectively carbon emission free. Consequently the taxpayer is paying twice as much as necessary to gain 30GW of carbon-free electricity, whilst blighting the landscape with unsightly windmills.  The simple question is: why?