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Letter: Wind farm worry
THE offshore wind farm, as wide as Mid Sussex, in last week’s Middy, should not be approved:
1. Offshore wind farms are unreliable. E.On boasts of “an installed electrical capacity of up to 700 MW” from the 100 to 195 turbines. This is the potential output if the wind was blowing at optimum speed all the time.
Currently all the 3,500 ugly, noisy turbines sited around the country feed on average just 1,000 MW into the grid – no more than the output of a single, medium-sized conventional power station. Because of this unreliability, conventional power stations will still be needed on permanent standby, thereby negating any alleged CO2 savings.
2. Offshore wind farms are an expensive way to produce electricity – nine times as much as gas-fired power. E.On would not dream of building this wind farm unless they were guaranteed a huge Government subsidy. This comes in the form of a subsidy scheme, paid for by dramatically increasing our household fuel bills, whereby owners of wind turbines earn an additional £49 for every ‘megawatt hour’ they produce, and twice that sum for offshore wind turbines.
What other industry gets a public subsidy equivalent to 100 or even 200 per cent of the value of what it produces?
3. Offshore wind farms do not ‘save the planet’ by cutting our emissions of CO2.
Even if you believe that curbing our use of fossil fuels could change the Earth’s climate, the CO2 reduction allegedly achieved by a wind farm over a year would be cancelled out by a single jumbo jet flying daily between Britain and America, over the same period.
(Sources: The Real Global Warming Disaster – Christopher Booker. The Rational Optimist – Matt Ridley)
Chris French,
Chairman, UKIP Mid Sussex,
Firtoft Close,
Burgess Hill
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Weather for Haywards Heath
Saturday 18 May 2013
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: 8 C to 17 C
Wind Speed: 12 mph
Wind direction: West
Tomorrow
Light showers
Temperature: 9 C to 16 C
Wind Speed: 10 mph
Wind direction: North east
