A week or so back, ex-Department of Energy and Climate Change apparatchik, and now head of RenewableUK, Hugh McNeal dropped the mother of all clangers, when talking about the “future” of wind power in Britain (see our post here).
The subsidies for wind power have been slashed and the wind industry, its parasites and spruikers have been attempting to engineer a reprieve, by rebranding fixed and guaranteed payments (of £80 per MWh – more than double current market prices of about £35 per MWh) as “subsidy free contracts” (see our post here). Not bad for a product with no commercial value.
With that piece of semantic trickery going nowhere, and the wind industry subsidy trough fast emptying, wind power outfits have finally got what they fear most: the opportunity to compete with conventional power generation sources; which is what led Hugh McNeal to his ‘revelation’ that:
“We are almost certainly not talking about the possibility of new plants in England. The project economics wouldn’t work; the wind speeds don’t allow for it.”
Hugh’s ‘unhelpful’ (for the wind industry) admission is a truth of universal application.
From Toronto to Timbuktu, from Bavaria to Burra, from Macarthur to Mainz, generating electricity using occasionally benevolent breezes does not, and will never, make any economic sense. America’s top investor, the Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett put it succinctly:
“I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire’s tax rate. For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”
Remove (or even threaten to curb) the massive subsidies for wind power – drawn from taxpayers and/or power consumers to the tune of hundreds of $billions – and the wind industry shrieks and shrivels like a water-soaked Wicked Witch of the West.
By highlighting its raison d’être, Hugh McNeal has candidly admitted that there is absolutely no justification for the destruction – economic, social and environmental – that is part and parcel of the wind industry. Which brings us to STT Champion, James Delingpole and his brilliant, withering attack on all those responsible for the Great Wind Power Fraud in Britain.
What Slim Jim has to say about Britain’s energy debacle has resonance around the Globe. Jim’s burning fury is, with respect, thoroughly justified. A band of political idiots, beguiled by criminals, chancers and shysters, have literally destroyed an economy, an electricity grid, whole communities and a bucolic landscape; and all for nothing.
The Great British Wind Farm Scandal: These Are The Heads That Should Roll
Breitbart.com
James Delingpole
11 Jun 2016
Regular readers may be aware that I am not a fan of wind farms.
This is because, among other things, they kill birds and bats, hurt the environment, cause sleeplessness and sickness in humans, drive up fuel prices, enrich troughing rent-seeking crony capitalist scumbags, blight views, cause people to die in fuel poverty, harm property values, destabilise the grid, and inflate the cost of living – all while signally failing at the one thing they’re supposed to be good at, viz supplying us with the clean, abundant, eco-friendly energy which is going to save us all from “global warming.”
For anyone prepared to do their research – as opposed to take back handers from the renewable industry, mouth green platitudes or get frightened off by the wind industry’s super-aggressive lawyers – all this has been obvious for years.
Now, even the wind industry’s leading spokesmen have come half way to admitting how utterly crap and pointless wind energy is.
In England, we learned this week from the head of the wind energy lobby group Renewable UK, the wind levels are so puny and unreliable that turbines cannot generate economically viable quantities of energy.
How about that all you idyllic villages from Cornwall through Northamptonshire to the Fens and thence up north to the humpy Howgills and beyond who’ve had your views blighted, your peace disturbed, your property values trashed, your avian wildlife sliced and diced, your livestock frightened and your community cohesion disrupted by wind projects you never wanted, which you fought hard to prevent, but which were dumped on your doorstep anyway?
How does it feel to know that – having wasted all that time, money and heartache trying unsuccessfully to fight those greedy developers and selfish landowners through the biased planning process only to be overruled by some sinister Inspector Blight figure from the Planning Inspectorate – you’ve belatedly been vindicated by the wind industry itself?
Yes, Big Wind has finally admitted: all those bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes dotted hither and thither over the choicest parts of the matchlessly beautiful English landscape were entirely unnecessary. They’re sitting on those hilltops, turning or not turning as the case may be, making so little difference to Britain’s “energy security” or power supplies or carbon emissions reductions or economy that really they might just as well not be there.
And the most stupid thing of all is we’re paying for it.
This is a disgrace. A national scandal. I’m racking my brain for some equivalents.
In terms of corruption combined with wanton vandalism, it’s akin to all those cities, especially in the North, whose town councillors – in league with developers – allowed perfectly decent Victorian housing stock to be destroyed and replaced by ugly, soul-destroying tower blocks.
In terms of abuse of state power, it is even worse. Property rights are one of the bedrocks of liberal democracy. Arbitrary confiscation – whether literally taking someone’s home and land or reducing its value through state-mandated blight – is something you associate with banana republics and communist tyrannies. Part of the social contract that electorates in Western liberal democracies enjoy is that, in return for their tax money the state will attempt to act in the interests of the people it serves.
Furthermore it is understood by all that the state will only act against its citizens’ individual interests in matters of overriding national importance, such as national security or the need to build infrastructure such as motorways.
Usually – and correctly – people are paid compensation by the government for any losses imposed on them in the “national interest”. But before any of this takes place, one more thing is naturally understood by all: that the government has submitted whatever mega-project it is about to undertake – be it depopulating a whole village in World War II for use as an urban warfare training centre or flattening a swathe of countryside to build the M1 – to a proper cost benefit analysis.
That is, one fully – and again quite reasonably – expects that when the state undertakes to do bad and expensive things to its people, it will have first taken steps to ensure that these bad and expensive things will ultimately result in more good than harm.
In the case of the Great Wind Con this manifestly hasn’t happened. Billions of pounds have been squandered, lives blighted and swathes of countryside ruined for a generation because of the lies, greed or incompetence of a fairly small group of people, some of whom frankly ought to be facing criminal charges for corruption, all of whose names ought to live in infamy for the damage they have wantonly inflicted on Britain’s landscape, people and economy.
Unfortunately it is often the way of British politics to let people go scot free for the disastrous cock ups they make while in government. I really don’t think we should. These tossers should be harried to the end of their days and then have their crimes engraved on their headstones as a salutary warning: ruin your country and we’ll ruin you.
Here are some of the rogues whose involvement in this grotesque and unforgiveable scam should never be forgotten.
Ed Miliband – Britain’s first Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change; failed Labour leader; unemployable gimp
Once said that opposing wind farms ought to be as “socially unacceptable as not wearing a seat belt”. As architect of the Climate Change Act – committing Britain to spending over £18 billion a year every year till 2050 pointlessly decarbonising her economy – he probably cost the British taxpayer more money, more pointlessly than any other politician in history.
The European Union
Not that we’re exactly short of reasons to loathe the EU but here’s another: it was responsible for the renewable energy targets – 20 per cent of energy to come from renewables by 2020 – that gave UK politicians like Ed Miliband the excuse they needed to railroad though the policy.
Bryony (now Baroness) Worthington – former Friends of the Earth activist; now in the House of Lords
Bryony effectively wrote the Climate Change Act for Miliband. It really is astonishing the leeway a minority interest campaigner from a hard left lobby group was given to create legislation that held the whole of Britain hostage to the anti-capitalist fantasies of a small group of green zealots.
David Cameron – Prime Minister; leader of the “greenest government ever”
He could have put a stop to this. As a Conservative, he really should have done. Conservatives are not supposed to be the enemy of property rights nor of the countryside. But instead – perhaps under the influence of his hippy wife SamCam – he sold the pass and embraced green nonsense wholesale. During his Coalition government he handed over the Department of Energy and Climate Change to the fanatically green Lib Dems – the equivalent, as PJ O’Rourke might put it, of giving car keys and whisky to small boys.
Chris Huhne; Ed Davey; Nick Clegg; Lib Dems generally
Huhne’s a perjuring spiv and jailbird; Davey’s thick as pigshit; Clegg is a revoltingly entitled, Westminster educated slimeball of a Euro creep. But let’s not dwell on the nice distinctions: the point is they’re all Lib Dems and therefore so ideologically wedded to the green project that they were quite incapable of subjecting its details to proper scrutiny. Like Dr Johnson said, “there is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.”
Sir Reginald Sheffield Bt
Of all the toffs with their snouts in the green trough why pick on Sir Reg? Well because he’s the Prime Minister’s father-in-law and because ultimately some of the £1000 a day he makes just to have eight wind turbines sitting doing bugger all on his Lincolnshire estates will end up in Dave and Sam Cam’s pockets – and I really don’t think it’s right that they should benefit financially, at taxpayers’ expense, from policies they helped engineer.
Toffs and landowners generally
Yes there are exceptions – the Duke of Northumberland, for one; my landlord in Northants being another. But generally the upper classes have behaved quite despicably in this matter. When the chips are down, it seems, they don’t give two hoots for the beauteous scenery they inherited by accident of birth. All that counts for them is the free money they get for having bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes on their estates. The Scottish toffs are by far the worst. But in England, special dishonourable mentions could go to Earl Spencer and the Duke of Gloucester, a member of the Royal Family no less: both have tried to host turbines on their lands, regardless of the protests of the poor sods who have to live with them.
That revolting man from Fisher German Estate Agents
I forget the awful creep’s name but he worked for Fisher German and his speciality was to travel the length and breadth of my county advising landowners of the cash bonanza that awaited them if only they didn’t mind totally ruining their neighbours views and peace. Naturally, he was a very passionate advocate for wind energy – and was totally deaf to its shortcomings. As Upton Sinclair said: “It is hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Obviously there are estate agents and land agents like that frightful man from Fisher German all over the country. May they all end up unemployed!
The RSPB
Not only has Europe’s largest wildlife charity promoted wind farms but actually benefited from them financially – despite copious evidence of the damage bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes to the very wildlife the RSPB is supposed to save. That’s why they call it the Royal Society for the Prevention of Birds.
Greenpeace; Friends of the Earth; the WWF etc
These helped promote the climate change hysteria which lent policymakers the apparent moral justification for forcing renewable energy on their electorates. They have never apologised for the damage their junk-science propagandising has caused and they never will.
Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors
By no means is the RICS the only professional institution to have jumped on the green bandwagon regardless of all evidence. But let it stand for all those public and professional bodies which has been corrupted morally and intellectually in the green scam. My beef with the RICS is its complicity in playing down evidence that wind farms have a significant impact on property values. This was shameful.
Acousticians
Again there have been honourable exceptions. But certain sections of the acoustics industry – they know who they are but if I name them I dare say they’ll try to sue me – have quite deliberately gamed the system, covered up evidence, even lied at the behest of the renewable energy behemoth. Had these people done their job half the wind farms blighting our landscape would never have been permitted on health and safety grounds because they’re just too damned close to human habitations – and the damaging effects of infrasound and the noises caused by wind sheer have been known to the acoustics industry for years.
Ecologists
One of the more despicable aspects of this scam – and it just goes to show how corrupting money can be – is the way people who presumably got their various ecology and environmental sciences degrees because they loved nature ended up using their qualifications to help destroy it. You often encountered them at planning hearings, abusing their professional status by testifying that “Oh no, don’t worry. In our expert opinion this sensitively sited wind farm won’t remotely damage any wildlife” – thus undermining one of the main planks in the defence used by hapless local communities trying desperately to avoid having one of these monstrosities plonked in their neighbourhood.
Conservatives
Again not all of them. But it’s quite amazing how many of them acquiesced in this scam – only five of them, for example, voted against the Climate Change Act. Most loathsome of the bunch, though, are the ones who actively pushed for more stringent green or renewable energy policies and who have often ended up benefiting from their various green business interests. Former MP Tim Yeo; the slithy Lord Deben; Charles Hendry. Wherever it is these scumbags live I do hope that no one ever invites them to dinner and that everyone cuts them when they bump into them in the village Post Office or wherever. I certainly would. How they can live with themselves or indeed sleep at night is a mystery to me.
Tony Blair
Well obviously. Almost everything that is wrong with the world can be traced, ultimately, to Tony Blair.
Dale “Dog On A Rope” Vince
Let this deeply unpleasant man stand for all the rent-seeking troughers who have benefited from this Ponzi scheme of an industry which I’m quite sure Enron would dearly have loved to have invented. Dale Vince has made a multi-million pound fortune not by creating value but simply by being canny enough to milk the system.
In an open market not one single wind turbine would have been erected in England (or anywhere else probably). They’re there purely because of the government’s regulatory fiat, which heavily incentivises people to build wind turbines not because they’re economically viable but because they’re politically useful.
This is crony capitalism pure and simple. It’s ugly, it represents an abuse of government power and I have no sympathy whatsoever for people who make their money in this way. They don’t deserve a penny of it. I wish I could show my contempt by shorting shares in Vince’s company. But you can’t because he’s not publicly quoted. I wonder why.
The BBC
Never once – so far as I can recall – has the BBC ever called into question the viability of or the need for these industrial blights on our landscape. It’s supposed to be impartial and to represent the interests of the whole country. Yet it has allowed itself to be captured by a narrow establishment with a vested interest in promulgating the renewable lie. This represents a betrayal of trust, an abuse of the licence fee and a failure of journalism.
The media generally
Here is what ought to be – indeed is – one of the most scandalous wastes of public money in living memory. Why weren’t our journalists on top of this?
This list is by no means exhaustive. What it does, I hope, is show how easy it is for vocal minority groups – in this case green activists – to hold public policy hostage and also how depressingly easy it is to buy the support of theoretically reputable institutions and individuals with a flash of filthy lucre. Wind energy is so wrong in so many ways that it should have never been allowed past the planning stage. Unfortunately money talks.
I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that this is the most disgraceful public scandals of our age. And I think it makes a nonsense of our belief that we are a country of great probity with an effective, honest political system.
If we were as high minded and decent as we kid ourselves, then some of the parties I have named above would be facing hefty fines or a stint in prison – and certainly the confiscation of their assets to compensate all the people who have lost out as a result of their dishonesty or, at best, grotesquely misguided high-mindedness. Green loons will always be with us. But the very least we ought to be able to expect our scientists, politicians, economists, businessmen and journalists to do is to hold their wild claims to account rather than indulging their fantasy and impoverishing ordinary people as a result.
And the scandal isn’t over yet, either.
As Paul Homewood reports, the Government is preparing to break its promise to put an end to the subsidies we are forced to pay this pointless and undeserving industry. Under pressure, clearly, from the powerful vested interests involved in the renewable energy scam, the Government plans to redefine the meaning of the word “subsidy” so that the troughers in the wind industry can carry on troughing. How sad to learn that Andrea Leadsom, the Conservative minister who acquitted herself so brilliantly in the Brexit debate on ITV the other night, should be playing a leading role in promulgating this duplicity.
If Cameron’s administration had a shred of moral integrity it would be distancing itself from this scandal as quickly as possible by apologising for its mistakes and making amends.
I hope this piece will be shared around the world by all those groups – I know there are lots of you – from Canada to Australia, from Scotland to Kenya, striving desperately to protect their own special stretch of countryside from this vile, mendacious, conscience-free industry.
One day, sooner rather than later, you will be vindicated by history. Wind energy – people will come to recognise – was one of the greatest follies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. If only the bottom-feeders who have promoted it or profited by it got the punishment they all deserve!
Breitbart.com
Slim Jim says ‘hang ’em high’!
About stopthesethings
STOP THESE THINGS 
Heads should roll, be put on platters and on spikes at Traitors Gate. A conspiracy of lunacy and greed. As one of the ‘vocal minority’ I am pleased to say, history shows it is people like us who do make the greatest changes.
“One day, sooner rather than later, you will be vindicated by history. ” Thanks JD – we will.
“Billions of pounds have been squandered, lives blighted and swathes of countryside ruined for a generation because of the lies, greed or incompetence of a fairly small group of people, some of whom frankly ought to be facing criminal charges for corruption, all of whose names ought to live in infamy for the damage they have wantonly inflicted on Britain’s landscape, people and economy.
Unfortunately it is often the way of British politics to let people go scot free for the disastrous cock ups they make while in government. I really don’t think we should. These tossers should be harried to the end of their days and then have their crimes engraved on their headstones as a salutary warning: ruin your country and we’ll ruin you.”
This needs to happen in Ontario too. I believe that we have the list compiled of all complicit players.
Hanging is too good all of those scumbags. None of them wanted to listen – even refused to listen to people’s genuine problems. What’s worse, many went out of their way to belittle people who genuinely suffered.
They should be forced to live under house arrest, with no chance of parole, in dwelling made uninhabitable by wind farm noise pollution.
Don’t forget the DTI (Dept of Trade & Industry) who facilitated the creation of ETSU-R97 and absolved themselves of any responsibility from the guidelines developed.
Also on the WANTED list are the Noise Working Group – and all the members therein who drew up a set of noise guidelines (ETSU-R-97) with the specific purpose of establishing the windustry in the UK. ETSU-R-97 guidelines were approved by the NWG (i.e. govt in collusion with the windustry) to facilitate development of the windustry without undue burden on the windustry.
ETSU guidelines, procedures and protocols were deliberately designed so that most of the noise emitted by industrial wind turbines would not be measured – ie. a political fix to establish the windustry. Use of A-weighted readings (despite Dr. Kelley’s warning in 1987), an example of one such protocol adopted in the ETSU guidelines, ensures that most of the noise in the low frerquency and infrasound spectrum are disregarded – effectively deleted from the total noise emissions.
ETSU disclaimer at the front of the document:
“This report was drawn up under the direction of the Noise Working Group. While the information contained in this report is given in good faith, it is issued strictly on the basis that any person or entity relying on it does so entirely at their own risk, and without the benefit of any warranty or commitment whatsoever on the part of the individuals or organisations involved in the report as to the veracity or accuracy of any facts or statements contained in this report. The views and judgements expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of ETSU, the Department of Trade and Industry or any of the other participating organisations.”
ETSU recommendation to review the guidelines in 2 years time (ie. 1998)
“The report was drafted in the light of the best information available at the time. However it is acknowledged that as more experience and information become available and as circumstances develop it may become necessary to revise and improve the contents of this report. The Noise Working Group therefore suggests this report and its recommendations are reviewed in two years time. To this end, any comments on the usefulness of the report would be most welcome, including any suggestions for improvement with any supporting evidence where possible.” (ETSU-R-97 has never been reviewed or updated.)
Since the ETSU guidelines were established in 1996, industrial wind turbines have grown significantly in size. This means that even more of their noise emissions are in the low frequency and infrasound spectrum … most of the noises in this spectrum are DISCOUNTED by ETSU protocols and procedures. Yet successive govts refusse to update ETSU guidelines.
The result of these ETSU guidelines in affording “protection” to people is that my wife was forced to leave home today after 10 years of chronic torture by exposure to wind turbine infrasonic noise pollution emissions.
Within a few days of a single 74m x 500kW turbine becoming operational 1.95 miles 3.14km from our home, she has been feeling constantly ill – and getting worse – with constant headaches, nausea and vertigo symptoms.
She’s also getting shaky hands and feels random twitches running through her body. She has no energy (feels Ugh all the time), can’t sleep or concentrate, feels a sensation that everything is out of place … as she describes it, she feels like she’s walking around with her reading glasses on).
She also hears pulses in the low frequency drone too – these appear to be synchronous with the blade passing the tower, even though we cannot see any turbone from our home.
She can’t take the torture any more, so she left home today for a break for an unspecified period of time.
Yes, we have thought of moving, but don’t know where we can move to to escape any more likelihood of infrasonic torture. The middle of a city appears to be the only option.
So sorry for your plight. You describe our future….
Thanks Rural101. We were expecting this for some time – it’s still a shock when it actually happens though. My wife, like many others, have essentially become wind industry refugees. There may not be bloodshed, but there is chronic torture. They both have the same effect of destroying people’s lives – the only difference is the speed of the destruction of those lives.
James is wonderful and encyclopedic about the wind power scam and sham. Wind turbines are good for one thing though. They make great tax shelters. Like any other constructions, they must be paid for. Guess who is made to pay for them?
We all know James is on the money, as usual, but until the lights go out with predictable regularity and prices reach stratosperic stupidity and govts face unavoidable embarassment and the long overdue ridicule that their thick skins will allow ain’t nothing going to happen. James knows it hence the frustration evident in his excellent and often humourous (but serious) piece. Whatever happens, this apalling scam, like all the great scams, has to come to and end. Sooner the better. Many thanks to James and STT and everyone doing their darndest to spread the word. William
Sir D.Walker-Smith, snippets from his speech on 16th November 1966 (Column474) “On the constitutional side, the agricultural position shows clearly under the Treaty of Rome we would no longer be masters in our own house and that the powers of decision would pass from Parliament. For many years this country has practised a system of price support. It may or may not be the best system, but it has operated for 20 years with the assent of both sides of the House, etc, etc”.
“But the constitutional question is clear. It would not matter if not one Member wanted to change the system. That would be irrelevant because, under the Treaty of Rome, if we join the Community the power of decision passes from this House”.
“I now turn to the political and constitutional aspects, of which there are two. First, there is the immediate affect of adherence to the Treaty on British sovereignty, and secondly, the future question whether membership of the Community carries any implied or inescapable commitment to political federation in the future?”……………………….
“I come now to the other question relating to the political and constitutional aspect—the immediate consequences of signing the Treaty of Rome. Here we can see the position much more clearly. Two truths are apparent—first, that over a wide range of our national life there would be an immediate abandonment of sovereignty and of our constitutional principle of the sovereignty of Parliament. The second truth is that, so far, the British people have very little idea of what is involved”.
THEY SURE KNOW NOW!