U.K. Wind farm subsidies cut by 25 per cent/ The dirty secret of Britain's power madness

First from reporter Robert Mendick in the Telegraph, then from James Delingpole

Wind farm subsidies cut by 25 per cent - Telegraph:

Long-term subsidies for wind farms are to be cut by a quarter, the Government will announce this week.
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Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat Energy Secretary, will announce the cut in subsidies for new wind farms as part of a radical overhaul of the electricity market.
He will say that the subsidies, which are added on to household electricity bills and paid for by consumers, will last for 15 years rather than 20 – effectively a 25 per cent cut. The plans, which will affect all wind farms built after 2017, will be outlined in an Energy Bill now before Parliament.
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Opponents of wind farms have long argued that the subsidies, introduced by the Labour government to encourage the industry, were far too generous. The Renewable Energy Foundation (REF), a think tank critical of the wind power industry, has estimated that consumers currently pay more than £1 billion a year in subsidies, and this is expected to rise to £6 billion a year by 2020 to meet targets for providing 30 per cent of electricity through green energy.
Dr John Constable, director of REF, said: “DECC’s reduction of subsidy entitlement from 20 to 15 years is a tacit admission of two key points, firstly that current subsidies are overgenerous, and secondly that wind turbines are in any case unlikely to have an economic life much over a decade.
“DECC needs to face up to the fact that subsidising existing renewable technologies hurts the consumer without delivering any significant benefit to climate change or creating a renewables industry that can actually stand on its own feet.”

Continue reading at the Telegraph:

The dirty secret of Britain's power madness: Polluting diesel generators built in secret by foreign companies to kick in when there's no wind for turbines - and other insane but true eco-scandals | Mail Online

• Moving to wind power is expected to cost £1 billion a year by 2015

• Official figures on the size of the green economy are extremely misleading

• They exaggerate the worth of the sector by up to 700 per cent

image from source article

 

Thousands of dirty diesel generators are being secretly prepared all over Britain to provide emergency back-up to prevent the National Grid collapsing when wind power fails.

And under the hugely costly scheme, the National Grid is set to pay up to 12 times the normal wholesale market rate for the electricity they generate.
One of the main beneficiaries of the stopgap plan is the Government itself, which stands to make hundreds of millions of pounds by leasing out the capacity of the generators in public-sector property including NHS hospitals, prisons, military bases, police and fire headquarters, schools and council offices.
But the losers will be consumers who can expect yet further hikes in their electricity bills in the name of ‘combating climate change’.

The scheme is expected to cost £1 billion a year by 2015, adding five per cent to energy bills.

Please continue reading James Dellingpole's Mail Online column

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On the generator theme, I'll note Parker Gallant and I wrote on an article in December 2011 which included:

The Liberal government altered the murky Global Adjustment mechanism for Ontario’s largest consumers of electricity shortly after Premier McGuinty penned an article where he noted; “The previous government’s plan was to use emergency diesel generators — again, a stopgap, dirty air solution.“ These very large customers are now charged a share of the Global Adjustment based on their share of usage only during a limited number of peak hours.  It has been estimated that these large wholesale customers can save $250,000 for every MW not consumed off of the grid during only 5 peak hours.  For large electricity users with standby diesel generators the functional message is clear: “Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em”

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