BBC radio wind documentary is seriously mischievous

BBC Radio 4s' recent "Costing The Earth" was described by one Green as "the most mischievous piece of documentary-making since Channel 4's 'The Great Global Warming Swindle'." The programmed certainly did well to confuse the UK public about the benefits of wind farms. Here's how one Green wrote it up:

For all of us who are likely to hear the misinformation repeated back to us on the doorstep, I thought I'd put together some notes:

The two key critics featured on the programme were Michael Jefferson, a former SHELL chief economist and now chairman of a committee of the World Renewable Energy Network, and Jim Oswald, an independent engineering consultant. Jim Oswald was commissioned by Noel Edmond's anti-wind propoganda machine "The Renewable Energy Foundation (REF)" to write his report, which criticised wind farms for their variable output and for sometimes being built in less windy areas of the country. The World Renewable Energy Network are reportedly "disowning" Michael Jefferson and his comments, dismissing him as an "oil and gas" expert not a wind energy expert. In the programme Jefferson tried to argue that many wind farms in England were "badly sited" with insufficient wind speeds to make them economic.

The British Wind Energy Association has dismissed the views expressed in the programme as "absolute nonsense" and "bizarre psuedo-science".

The presenter Miriam O'Reilly claimed in her programme "a wind farm should have a 30% load factor", that anything less than this would would render them not "effective enough to be of any use"!?!? This is blatant nonsense. Even her consultant Jim Oswald contradicted her, saying of lower load factors: "it means you make a bit less return on your money, if you've paid for the wind farm, but it doesn't matter too much to the national grid, it just means you've got to build a few more wind farms."

Additional note: "Load Factor" or "Capacity Factor" refers to the average output of an power plant expressed as a percentage of its peak output. Example: A 3MW wind turbine will produce power proportional to the speed the wind is blowing, up to a maximum of 3MW. The average output over a year might be 1MW, in which case the turbine would be said to have a 33% load factor.

Jefferson hyped up the "underperforming" accusations, giving an example wind turbine in Hertfordshire with a load factor of 7.6 percent. The Scotsman newspaper have chased up this claim, and found it's actually a single turbine at a renewable energy company's offices - not an example of a typical UK wind farm.

One of the programme's opening quotes was: "We as electricity consumers are paying very very heavily for the subsidies which go to developers." The truth behind government funding of renewable energy is that there are no capital grants for building onshore wind farms - it's all funded by private investment to the tune of £1-2m per turbine. What the government does provide is a market-based incentive scheme called the Renewables Obligation. This works by setting an increasing target for the percentage of renewable energy in the electricity mix each year, and "fining" electricity supply companies for every unit of renewable electricity they fall short by. Each year these fines are collected up and handed out to each producer of renewable energy, proportional to the units of electricity they've generated. This year the target is 6.7%. If the targets were met, there would be no "fine", and no extra income for the renewable energy producers. The supply companies are passing the cost of the fines on to the consumers. Overall this is a mechanism which incentivises the development of the most cost-effective renewable energy.

Another claim in the programme was that the "Renewables Obligation" is costing the average consumer £90 per year, which is massively overhyped - the real cost is about £8.

The fact that the UK is due to miss its target by miles is now mainly the fault of the planning system, with each renewable energy planning application costing the developer hundreds of thousands of pounds, taking an average of nearly two years to get a decision from the planning system (when it should be within 16 weeks) and with two thirds of all applications still being turned down. Download more here.

The BWEA confirms that wind supplies 1.5% of UK electricity needs, which makes the presenter's claimed figure of 0.5% a clear fiction. The presenter also claims that the Government have put half a billion pounds of subsidy into the wind industry to reach this point. Even if this is true (I haven't checked), it's only a quarter of the £2bn which the BWEA say the private sector have invested in the industry, and for perspective, a sixth of the £3bn which the government have wasted on pre-school learning initiatives since 2001 which have had "no effect" according to a study released this month.

Although the programme presenter never mentions "visual impact", "giant bird blenders" or "industrialised landscape", she does give away her affiliation to the anti-wind lobby by the misuse of one term: "efficiency". Antis just love to refer to the capacity factor of a wind turbine as its "efficiency", thus a 25% capacity factor is translated as "only 25% efficient" - which is clearly an eco-crime as we're all good greens striving for more efficiency! Isn't it a shocking waste that the wind doesn't blow at a constant gale force in the UK - in which case we could have nearer a 100% capacity factor!! Likewise that the sun doesn't shine all the time - those stupid solar panels are just so wasteful at night!! In fact it is now a proven breach of advertising standards to call wind farms "inefficient" because of their capacity factor (see note below).

Additional note: In June 2007 Advertising Standards Authority ruling that referring to "Capacity or Load Factor" as "Efficiency" is misleading and a breach of advertising standards: " We understood, however, that efficiency normally referred to the actual amount of energy extracted as a fraction of the total energy available. By contrast, we noted the CF referred to the amount of energy extracted as a fraction of the theoretical maximum amount of energy and not the amount of energy actually available to a turbine in the course of a year. We considered that the CF was not an appropriate method of assessing the actual efficiency or inefficiency of a wind turbine. We concluded that the claim was likely to mislead."

Here's another perhaps simpler refutation from another Green:

Yes, the public subsidy is directly proportional to the amount of renewable energy that is generated, so it's obvious nonsense to suggest that we are paying for non-production. Actually, far from preventing windfarms on relatively lower windspeed sites I'd actually pay them (per KWh generated) at a slightly higher rate, like they do in Germany. Wind power even from relatively lower windspeed commercial sites is still a cheap resource compared to other renewable technologies, including wave power, tidal stream and even offshore windfarms that we must also be supporting. So we need to maximise production from as much commercial windfarms as possible on financial grounds, especially given the various other limitations on windfarms.

If you applied the 'high windspeed' only rule to Germany, where windspeeds are usually lower even than the 'lower' windspeed' commercial windfarms in the UK then there would actually be virtually no wind power at all in Germany!

Perhaps should compare to Oldbury nuke?

Lastly what are they comparing these figures with? Oldbury has had one reactor closed for 2 years and the other 11 months but for 8 days. And it's not just here there have been problems - across the UK nuclear reactors have closed for problems and for their regular downtime - often 2 months or more - plus Japan, Sweden, Germany, France and more have all had serious problems.